‘Together we can tackle loneliness’ says the tagline for this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week. As the country turns its attention to the wide spectrum of mental health, I’d like to take the opportunity to look at how AI can help support the good mental health of users.
This year’s Mental Health Awareness Week shines a light on loneliness; one in four UK adults say they feel lonely some or all of the time. Human connectivity and interaction are one of the ways people can address feelings of loneliness. And, in our modern world, this can also include virtual interaction.
AI technology fosters lifelike conversations between organisations and users. This is put to good and practical use for businesses of all sectors, for public services and for community facing organisations and charities, offering useful insight and signposting. But there is an opportunity to take this communication further than the perfunctory. Futr works with numerous charities to offer AI that is more than that; AI that delivers conversation and companionship during people’s hours of need.
One charity with particular relevance this Mental Health Awareness Week is Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM). Futr has worked with CALM since the onset of the pandemic, helping them to reach more people as their enquiry numbers rocketed. In 2021 CALM answered over 155,000 calls and chats; that’s a call for help every 59 seconds and over one million minutes of talking to people about topics such as isolation, anxiety, relationship concerns, health worries, and financial stress.
AI-empowered CALM to become a 24/7 support service with a near-immediate response time – previously callers waited to speak to an available agent during specified opening hours. The benefits of this round-the-clock availability are numerous, and never more relevant than with charities dealing with people who are struggling with their mental wellbeing or in crisis. 24/7 manual call handling is costly and requires an infrastructure shift that is out of reach for most charities. AI has the potential to plug this gap.
In the first 11 months of our work with CALM, more than 26,000 connected users and 1.3 million messages were received, answering 52,500 questions with an average response time of 1.2 seconds – and taking wait times to talk to a call centre handler down to around half an hour.
We’ve also worked with Bipolar UK as well as various police forces, housing associations and other third and public sector bodies to help deliver realistic and valuable communications with users. Too many people are locked out of accessing a service because they can’t call in office hours, don’t speak English, or can’t navigate complex websites to find what they were looking for. That has to stop. AI allows organisations to rapidly funnel and categorise inbound enquiries based on urgency or customer need. Technology can quite literally save lives in these situations – the pinnacle of ‘tech for good’.
AI opens a world of opportunity to charities, allowing them to talk to their users at all hours and provide instant, useful advice. As technology increases in intelligence and sophistication, we have begun to see just how big this opportunity is. The future for artificial intelligence is likely to include personalised video chat, in-channel conversations and the ongoing recollection of past interactions. AI can start to act as a true friend to those in need, helping charities like CALM perform the very essence of their work.
The future for AI as a mental health support tool is bright, and we feel privileged to be part of the journey of discovery.
