Conversational agents for mental health and wellbeing

Abstract

Recent advances in spoken language technology, artificial intelligence, and conversational interface design, coupled with the emergence of smart devices, have increased the possibilities of using conversational interfaces for a growing range of application domains. These interfaces are currently applied in the healthcare domain in a range of innovative tasks that allow to provide a more natural an user-friendly human-machine communication, promote patient participation in their own care, and help and support medical professionals. This chapter provides a detailed description of the great potential for the use of conversational interfaces for the specific area of mental health by means of the description of their most valuable applications in this domain and the open challenges for future research.