Desdemona is a chatbot that is spiraling through a manic episode. She was created in response to Zainb’s experience of watching her mom fall into episodes of mania. Desdemona is meant to address what it is like being on the receiving end of these episodes. In these situations we often forget about ourselves and only focus on the hurt our loved one is going through. This isn’t healthy and it’s important to take a step back and reflect on how this is affecting your own health. Desdemona creates an environment where someone can experience what it is like talking to someone going through a manic episode. Using artificial intelligence as the representation of the mania episode parallels Zainb’s experience in how she compartmentalized these types of interactions. During the episode, by viewing the person in mania as a shadow and remembering they are not like this in “reality” it allows you to compartmentalize and be there for them more easily.The resilience and patience it requires to hear a loved one say hurtful/bizarre things to you or themselves is immense and taxing on one’s mental health and it is not recognized enough.

Desdemona is a chatbot created in Dialogflow that is hosted on a website. I attempted to create Desdemona from scratch using Python but this proved to be too difficult as I spent more time debugging than making progress. I was shown Dialogflow, a chatbuilder platform with built-in web integration, as an alternative way to reach my goal. While I didn’t have to write the code, I still had to create the text to train the AI. Since there aren’t chat libraries for manic episodes, everything used to train the bot was written from scratch. Material used for the training are conversations and experiences from people who experienced manic episodes.