Linguistic Diversity and Mental Well-Being: Co-Designing Custom AI Chatbots with Multilingual Mothers

DOI

Language plays a crucial role in mental health, from expressing emotions to challenging mental health stigma. While large language models provide significant potential to help address the global mental health crises, it remains unclear how conversational AI chatbots could support linguistic diversity. We investigate this problem space by focusing on women's mental well-being and presenting the findings of co-design sessions with multilingual mothers. While participants described mental well-being related lexical gaps in non-English languages and cognitive effort in expressing emotions in English, they reported frequent code-switching and preferences to regulate emotions using their first language. When evaluating co-created AI chatbots in non-English languages, participants criticised inappropriate language styles, translation errors, and a lack of dialect-specific nuances. We discuss the importance of co-designing multilingual conversational user interfaces with linguistically diverse groups to mitigate health inequalities and support people’s unique and changing language preferences in self-managing their health and well-being.