I was shocked to hear that 50% of suicide cases went for help and couldn’t find it. Lifeline can have hour long wait times. ER can have a “there’s nothing wrong with you, go away” mentality.
My proposal is to take transcripts from interactions on systems like lifeline, put them through GPT2 and generate a bot that can act as the ear that someone needs. Using googles new voice stuff it might be able to interact with a troubled person and give the impression that it cares. It’s NOT a replacement for real services, but these people need help and they cannot find it. Perhaps therapy bots will be the first to succeed.