CAIA in Practice: Field Evaluation of an AI-Assisted Support System for Text-Based Online Counselling

Abstract:Rising global demand for mental health support creates significant service delivery challenges, with asynchronous email counselling serving as a crucial low-threshold channel for accessing care. This paper presents CAIA, a co-designed AI-based tool suite that demonstrates responsible AI integration into counselling practice through seven LLM-driven functions enhanced by retrieval-augmented generation. A field evaluation involved 34 professional counsellors conducting authentic sessions with trained student counsellees (36 threads, 321 messages, 1,257 AI outputs). User behaviour analysis confirms substantial adoption, revealing that professional autonomy and information accuracy are decisive for sustained acceptance, with counsellors particularly valuing interpretive functionalities that provide new perspectives and stimulate professional reflection.

Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.22251 [cs.HC]

(or arXiv:2608.22251v1 [cs.HC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.22251 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

2025 IEEE 37th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI), pp. 1476-1483

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICTAI66417.2025.00214 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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