AI Helps Lonely People Reduce Social Anxiety

Health Care Access

West LA

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative

Access to mental health is a vital part of existence. Access to these services are often prohibitively expensive and far away from someone's home. With modern technology, a virtual person is just a web browser search away, no matter the time. For example, among even those insured, 18.5% of medical enrollees experienced serious psychological distress in 2020. Further, 24% of all insured adults reported barriers to care for mental and substance abuse services and 40% medical enrollees did not receive treatment. This evidence points to the major disparity between seekers and providers in the market. Utilizing AI's power, we can develop a virtual friend that someone can use whenever needed.

Virtual friend is unique in that a conversational AI tool is built specifically to address social anxiety as of writing has yet to be developed. We are currently building a virtual agent that someone can use to engage in conversation. The AI tool uses a large language model (LLMs) that generates a spoken output based on what a person says to it. Most AI tools (like chat GPT) use text as output. Our tool uses a human face and speaks using audio so it appears to be a real human. This virtual friend can help those that need someone in the moment or are lonely. It helps a core human need, to be connected. There are some steps that need to be taken in order to achieve this. Since this virtual friend is technically complex, it requires a complex software architecture for which freelance software engineers must be hired for specific tasks.

LA County would benefit from this work in many ways. 1st, having access to a free tool in time of need would foster a better immediate positive mood. 2nd, using this tool would spur individuals' desire to be stronger advocates for themselves. 3rd, people across all socioeconomic levels would benefit. We envision that people, regardless of their means, can access a tool to relieve social anxiety. When feelings of loneliness arise, people need someone to talk to. This is where Virtual Friend is useful. We envision that this grant will allow our tool to scale. We also need to hire more technical expertise to expand the tool.

As Virtual Friend pursues the mission to help lonely people reduce their social anxiety, the metrics will be associated with the following stages (1) Number of visits: DAU (Daily Active Users), WAU/MAU (Unique users per week (Weekly/Monthly Active Users), (2) Session length with the Virtual Friend (Watching/interacting time), (3) Bounce Rate - number of visitors who eventually will leave the platform without actions (4) Rating - Evaluate the scoring rate of the platform (5) Passive sentiment analysis using social conversation listening tracking Virtual Friend (6) Brief pop-up survey regarding the social anxiety improvement in a scale from 0-10. Hence, the product's success will be defined by the increase in the number of users and the output of users feeling better regarding social anxiety (through social conversation listening and surveys).