🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the global shortage of evidence-based psychotherapy resources—even in high-income regions, where long wait times persist—by proposing a large language model–based embodied conversational agent. The system uniquely integrates multilevel psychological analysis, process-oriented therapeutic principles, and embodied interaction, leveraging retrieval-augmented generation, emotion recognition, psychological flexibility assessment, and synchronized speech animation to deliver real-time, clinically safe, and evidence-informed responses. Evaluated under a GPT-5.2 configuration, the agent outperformed human therapist responses in comprehension, interpersonal effectiveness, collaboration, and therapeutic adherence, and received endorsement from eleven licensed psychotherapists. This work establishes a novel, supervisable, and safety-controlled paradigm for AI-delivered psychological support.
📝 Abstract
Access to evidence-based psychotherapy remains limited worldwide, with long waitlists even in high-income regions. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer potential for scalable mental health support when designed with clinical oversight and safety mechanisms. We present Mind Companion, an LLM-based embodied conversational agent integrating multi-layered psychological analysis with process-based therapy principles. The system performs real-time analysis of client statements across fact extraction, psychological flexibility process detection, emotion recognition, and safety monitoring. Analysis results are stored for supervising clinicians to inform therapeutic planning. Response generation incorporates retrieval-augmented generation from evidence-based therapeutic literature and context-aware prompting. Responses are delivered through an embodied avatar with synchronized speech synthesis and animation. We evaluated three LLM configurations (GPT-4.1-mini, GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4.5) against therapist responses from real therapy sessions using automated LLM-judge assessment and expert evaluation with 11 professional psychotherapists. GPT-5.2 achieved higher ratings than human therapist responses across understanding, interpersonal effectiveness, collaboration, and therapeutic alignment in both evaluations, demonstrating the feasibility of LLM-based conversational agents as tools to complement clinical care.