TL;DR= Chatbot for mental health
"Eliza" was the old-school chat-bot / psychotherapist back in
the 80's.
It's past time for us, as a culture to have her updated.
The basic web/mobile app would work like this:
1) The user chats (anonymously) about life, esp. problems.
2) The Eliza2014bot
chats back comfortably enough, while
looking for keywords related to special topics (suicide,
heartbreak, addiction, procrastination, etc).
3) As the chat continues, ads show up for certified therapists,
life coaches, etc on the sponsors tab (related to those
keywords)
4) If you click an ad, you have the option to pass the
transcript directly to the human professional, who will value
that data as insightful in helping start you on a faster path to
mental health.
It is entirely anonymous, until/unless you reveal your identity
to a paid professional, in the normal way people do today.
Besides helping people get better lives faster, this could also
give us key insights into regional mental health concerns
when taken in aggregate. (Seeing things like prescription
drug abuse popping up in hot zones.)
Like many other "automated" systems, this is a hybrid model
in 2 important ways:
A) Filtering/Matching
People filter through Eliza2014 before going to the right
professional, as they might solve their problems with just a
little help, and/or they might self-identify into the better
matched category for help.
B) Bot updates
A sample of sessions, (esp. those rated poorly by users) will be anonymously sent for review by a committee (a subset of
pro-users), who can then adjust/add scripts to the bot to
improve its relevancy to current users.
I've thought of building this, but I think it's a bit too creepy.
I'm just throwing this out as "inevitable" so nobody else can
patent it. That encourages an open-source execution rather
than privatized & corporate.