This paper proposes a Voice-Enabled AI Mental Wellness Companion that is an intelligent system developed to offer users personalized, interactive, and accessible mental health support. In our modern world with its rapid rate of development and reliance on advanced technologies, stress, anxiety and emotional instability has become increasingly prevalent for individuals due to pressures from academia, work and social activities. However, many digital solutions available are rigid in real-time adaptability, context awareness and the extent of personalized user engagement. The system proposed incorporates AI, voice enabled interfaces, and data-driven emotional analytics within a scalable system that has been developed to help individuals maintain emotional stability. The application will be available for users to make daily mood entries, communicate with an AI Chatbot for mental support, maintain private digital diaries, participate in breathing exercises or meditation techniques to reduce stress. A detailed mood analytics dashboard will then analyze the history of the user’s emotional data to provide data representations about the trends of their psychological state over time. The ability to incorporate a voice-based interface would add a natural mode of interaction over text-based conversation thereby increasing user accessibility and the level of user interaction with the AI system. The system backend is secured with encrypted data management and controlled authentication methods in order to protect the user's data relating to their history of mood entries, chatbot interactions and activity data. Results from the evaluation show that with personalization in recommendations and consistent tracking of user's emotional data, user self-awareness, emotional regulation and the level of user engagement improved. This developed solution shows that the AI Mental Wellness Companion has a viable function of being a pre-emptive system for supporting a user's emotional wellness without acting as a replacement for professional psychological health care.
Sandile et al. (Wed,) studied this question.