Empathic Chatbot: Emotional Intelligence for Empathic Chatbot: Emotional Intelligence for Mental Health Well-being

Conversational chatbots are Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered applications that assist users with various tasks by responding in natural language and are prevalent across different industries. Most of the chatbots that we encounter on websites and digital assistants such as Alexa, Siri does not express empathy towards the user, and their ability to empathise remains immature. Lack of empathy towards the user is not critical for a transactional or interactive chatbot, but the bots designed to support mental healthcare patients need to understand the emotional state of the user and tailor the conversations. This research explains the different types of emotional intelligence methodologies adopted in the development of an empathic chatbot and how far they have been adopted and succeeded.