Empathic Chatbot: Emotional Intelligence for Empathic Chatbot: Emotional Intelligence for Mental Health Well-being

TL;DR

This paper reviews emotional intelligence methods used in developing empathic chatbots, emphasizing their importance for mental health support and analyzing their current effectiveness.

Contribution

It provides an overview of emotional intelligence techniques in empathic chatbots and evaluates their adoption and success in mental health applications.

Findings

Various emotional intelligence methodologies are adopted in empathic chatbots.

Current methods show promise but still have limitations in understanding user emotions.

Empathic chatbots can potentially improve mental health support if emotional understanding is enhanced.

Abstract

Conversational chatbots are Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered applications that assist users with various tasks by responding in natural language and are prevalent across different industries. Most of the chatbots that we encounter on websites and digital assistants such as Alexa, Siri does not express empathy towards the user, and their ability to empathise remains immature. Lack of empathy towards the user is not critical for a transactional or interactive chatbot, but the bots designed to support mental healthcare patients need to understand the emotional state of the user and tailor the conversations. This research explains the different types of emotional intelligence methodologies adopted in the development of an empathic chatbot and how far they have been adopted and succeeded.