SUKHSANDESH: An Avatar Therapeutic Question Answering Platform for Sexual Education in Rural India

TL;DR

SUKHSANDESH is an AI-powered avatar-based question answering platform designed to provide safe, regional language sexual education in rural India, integrating avatar therapy to enhance engagement and empathy.

Contribution

This work introduces a novel avatar therapy feature combined with AI-driven QA for sexual education tailored to rural Indian contexts, emphasizing safety and regional language support.

Findings

Effective response delivery via information retrieval and large language models

Implementation of safety guardrails and dataset anonymization

Deployment in partnership with Gram Vaani for rural outreach

Abstract

Sexual education aims to foster a healthy lifestyle in terms of emotional, mental and social well-being. In countries like India, where adolescents form the largest demographic group, they face significant vulnerabilities concerning sexual health. Unfortunately, sexual education is often stigmatized, creating barriers to providing essential counseling and information to this at-risk population. Consequently, issues such as early pregnancy, unsafe abortions, sexually transmitted infections, and sexual violence become prevalent. Our current proposal aims to provide a safe and trustworthy platform for sexual education to the vulnerable rural Indian population, thereby fostering the healthy and overall growth of the nation. In this regard, we strive towards designing SUKHSANDESH, a multi-staged AI-based Question Answering platform for sexual education tailored to rural India, adhering to safety guardrails and regional language support. By utilizing information retrieval techniques and large language models, SUKHSANDESH will deliver effective responses to user queries. We also propose to anonymise the dataset to mitigate safety measures and set AI guardrails against any harmful or unwanted response generation. Moreover, an innovative feature of our proposal involves integrating ``avatar therapy'' with SUKHSANDESH. This feature will convert AI-generated responses into real-time audio delivered by an animated avatar speaking regional Indian languages. This approach aims to foster empathy and connection, which is particularly beneficial for individuals with limited literacy skills. Partnering with Gram Vaani, an industry leader, we will deploy SUKHSANDESH to address sexual education needs in rural India.