Applications of AI-powered Conversational Chatbot for Mental Health

Psychological issues have become a pervasive problem affecting the quality of life for many individuals. However, the scarcity of professional psychotherapists and the high threshold for receiving human psychological counselling prevent most people from obtaining timely, high-quality psychological help. To address this issue, chatbots have been developed to participate in the promotion of public mental health. Empowered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially Large Language Models (LLMs), chatbots have the potential to revolutionize the field of mental health by offering personalized and full-time support. Moreover, AI-powered chatbots can assist researchers in collecting more data to understand mental health better and develop more effective treatments. This paper categorizes and summarizes the recent applications of conversational chatbot technology in the mental health field, including human-robot relationships, the use of conversational chatbots with mental health tasks in counselling and online settings, the generation of counselling dialogue data, and the evaluation of datasets and models. The advantages and disadvantages of these technologies are explored, along with the current technical shortcomings of conversational chatbots. Additionally, the challenges to their widespread adoption and use, as well as future directions for development, are discussed.