Development of Chatbot Psychologist Applying Natural Language Understanding Techniques

The importance of maintaining mental health has been recognized around the world, but the number of professionals offering such services has increased slightly, and therefore not everyone has the opportunity to receive consultations on a regular basis. According to statistics, the majority of people experienced anxiety and stress and at the same time noted that they had never visited a psychologist or a psychotherapist. The overall level of satisfaction with the services received in hospital institutions was low. As one of the reasons, respondents noted a long waiting period for an appointment with a specialist. The use of chatbots can help reduce this dissatisfaction, as the machines can consult around the clock and without rest, and are accessible to anyone with a computer or smartphone. In this article, we offer our first results in creating an intelligent chatbot to support the psychological state of people from the Kazakh audience. For the development and training of the chatbot, we used technologies such as Rasa, Natural Language Understanding. The results of the experiments showed 72% accuracy in the selection of responses when talking to patients.