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March 04, 2024

IWill Therapy and IWill CARE uses Azure AI to help improve clients’ mental health

IWill Therapy and IWill CARE, a leading online mental health care provider in India, needed to reach more clients. It created a Hindi-speaking chatbot named IWill GITA using the cutting-edge products and services included in the unified Azure AI Studio platform, incorporating the latest large language models in Azure OpenAI Service and integrated Azure AI Content Safety filters. IWill‘s scalable, AI-powered bot now provides cognitive behavioral therapy to bring mental health access and therapist-like conversations to people throughout India.

IWill Therapy and IWill CARE

More than 1 billion people worldwide need mental healthcare, with 60 to 70 million of them in India alone.1 Access to mental health is exceptionally low in India. The gap between people needing care and available treatment is one of the highest in the world, estimated to be as high as 80 percent. 2 Obstacles to lowering this gap include ignorance, the stigmatization of mental illness, financial barriers, and the severe shortage of clinicians.

As a leading online mental health care provider in India, IWill Therapy & CARE supplies around-the-clock, professional, world-class therapy and counseling services to customers in their homes, offices, or anywhere else, using an audio, video, chat, and message interface. IWill is more than the name of a mental health provider in India—it is a statement of intention for the organization’s clients. “I will regain my confidence. I will get past this difficult time. I will be able to follow my dreams.” IWill aims to normalize mental health issues and to help all members of society understand that everyone is vulnerable to an emotional or mental health trauma, and all have the option of getting help. The clinic’s goal is to change lives by creating a secure and sensitive environment where everyone receives nurturing and professional treatment that is private, nonjudgmental, and free of stigma.

Founder and CEO Shipra Dawar ventured boldly into the mental health industry in 2015 by establishing an online platform. Using her own experience with overcoming depression, Dawar brings empathy and understanding to the challenges for those living with a mental health issue. Dawar believes that everyone deserves access to high-quality mental health therapy. As Dawar says, “It’s okay not to be okay, and we work tirelessly to disseminate information and awareness about that. We also knew that technology was the only way to deliver services to the remotest corners of India.”

A context-specific solution

The fact that most potential clients have  mild mental health issues inspired IWill to create a chatbot to reach its clients. With technology aiding less severe concerns, IWill practitioners could assist those with deeper needs. Any solution had to provide human-like, open-ended conversations but constrain discussions to prevent harm to vulnerable users. It was also essential that the bot be secure and private.  As Dawar says, “We flirted with potential technologies, but nothing gave us the confidence that we were building an answer that would scale to meet our needs and promote innovation rather than create limits. When we found Microsoft as a collaborator, we knew we’d found the right fit.”

IWill began exploring Microsoft Azure AI and its generative AI capabilities. The team evaluated the cutting-edge products and services included in the unified Azure AI Studio platform, which features access to cutting-edge models in Azure OpenAI Service as well as other foundation and open models with integrated Azure AI Content Safety filters to mitigate harmful content.

IWill had previously tried other large language models (LLMs) and systems. The previous models fell short on safety, predictability, and empathy. But Azure had those covered with Azure OpenAI Service featuring the OpenAI models. Interoperability and integration were challenges that Azure overcame as well. “We found that the Azure user interface removed the communication gap between engineers and businesspeople,” says Ashish Dwivedi, Co-founder and COO. “It made it easy for us to train subject-matter experts in one day, enabling them to progress with minimal help from engineers.”

Serving clients in Hindi, a language spoken by 600 million people in India, with the potential to add other Indian languages was a key requirement for the IWill bot. The Azure AI Studio platform was used to help IWill build safe models, finely tuned with context-specific, relevant data for specific languages. IWill also uses a portfolio of Azure services, including Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure DevOps, and Azure Virtual Machines, to host the application’s front- and back-end, DevOps, and security.

New pathways to health

Building safe, empathic, context-specific, local language AI conversational tools is now more important than ever. The first-generation AI bots lacked the power of being highly empathic and accurate at the same time. IWill built a bot named IWill GITA that is far more transformative and helpful for users in need of care. Often this may be the first line of help available.

IWill‘s scalable, AI-powered bot now provides cognitive behavioral therapy to bring mental health access and therapist-like conversations to people throughout India. Users go through a screening process to ensure the bot is the right match for their therapeutic care and then participate in a six-week long program. Clients can express themselves openly in a conversational setting and receive therapist-like responses from the bot. The bot enables natural conversations to take place, allowing users to process and understand their emotions and feelings. Should the bot detect a more severe issue, it alerts a clinician who can then intervene.

Beginning with a pilot and scaling up to widespread availability for its bot, IWill was confident that controlled, generative AI would be effective. Client response has been overwhelmingly positive in the early days of deployment. “We received phenomenal feedback for the product from clients who found it humanlike, well moderated, and capable of bringing them tangible, positive change,” says Dawar. One user, for example, had faced 20 job rejections and feared applying for any new positions. Interfacing with the bot helped them gain a positive attitude, face the next interview with confidence—and, best of all, secure a new job.

IWill now has an extensive road map for bringing its mental health self-care tool to a broader Indian audience and for continuing to extend its work. The clinic’s current focus is to build support for individuals with mild concerns of mental health and self-care and for people already seeking help, using AI as additional support. IWill also has safety nets to help make its service safe, effective, private, and always transparent to the client while ensuring their wellbeing and comfort.

Find out more about IWill on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

1 World Mental Health Day: 60-70 mn people in India suffer from common mental disorders; stigmatization & financial barriers prevent timely treatment, The Economic Times, October 10, 2023 

2 Mental Health Care Analysis, The Times of India, October 7, 2022


“We found that the Azure AI Studio user interface removed the communication gap between engineers and businesspeople. It made it easy for us to train subject matter experts in one day, enabling them to progress with minimal help from engineers.”

Ashish Dwivedi, Co-founder and COO, IWill Therapy and IWill CARE

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