Emotionally Intelligent Artificial Intelligent Virtual Companion (Undergraduate Research Project)

Issues of mental health are still some of the most unaddressed health issues in India. With a struggling infrastructure for mental healthcare, the increasing number of people who suffer from these issues do not find help in the resources currently available to them. While efforts are being made to improve this situation across the globe, there is still a huge demand being unmet. This is detrimental when we consider that the lives of people are at stake. Seeking to create a solution to address this problem, my group of 3 came up with a system to leverage state-of-the-art solutions from artificial intelligence. The model dubbed "MYK" was designed as a conversational agent to develop long term relationships with the user. MYK was trained to understand the personality of the user, use knowledge graphs to retrieve relevant conversation history, and to also carry different kinds of conversations with the user. The project was developed over the course of 2 years from its initial idea to its latest iteration. The project was mainly used as a jump-off point for learning the latest tools in NLP and more broadly in AI, particularly as it relates to emotional intelligence and long-term relationship establishment between users and conversational agents. An early prototypical version of the model was published as a paper, a link to which can be found below. There are 5 more manuscripts from this project which are at various stages of publication.