The FAIIR conversational AI agent assistant for youth mental health service provision

Abstract

Frontline crisis support plays a critical role in youth mental health services, where Crisis Responders (CRs) engage in conversations and assign issue tags to guide interventions. To enhance this process, we introduce FAIIR (Frontline Assistant: Issue Identification and Recommendation), an ensemble of domain-adapted transformer models trained on 780,000 conversations. FAIIR aims to reduce CR’s cognitive burden, enhance issue identification accuracy, and streamline post-conversation administrative tasks. Evaluated on retrospective data, FAIIR achieves an average AUC ROC of 94%, an average F1-score of 64%, and an average recall score of 81%. During the silent testing phase, its performance remained robust, with less than a 2% drop in all metrics. CRs exhibited 90.9% agreement with its predictions, and expert agreement with FAIIR exceeded their agreement with original labels. These findings highlight FAIIR’s potential to assist CRs in prioritizing urgent cases and ensuring appropriate resource allocation in crisis interventions.