AI-based psychological support chat-bot

About the project:
This is a project of a Telegram bot created to provide initial emotional support to users. The goal is to create a safe space where a person can express their feelings and receive a warm, empathetic response from an AI conversational partner.

Key features and characteristics:

Intelligent core based on Google Gemini:

The bot uses the powerful language model gemini-1.5-flash-latest for conducting deep and meaningful dialogues.

A detailed system prompt has been developed to set the AI's role as an empathetic conversational partner, not a psychologist, and to define the communication style.

Crisis situation handling:

Built-in mechanism for recognizing key words related to suicidal thoughts.

In case of risk detection, the bot automatically sends a message with contacts of emergency psychological assistance services in Ukraine.

Contextual memory:

The bot saves the dialogue history with each user, allowing it to maintain conversation context and provide more relevant responses.

Thoughtful user experience:

Implemented commands /start, /help, /reset for convenient navigation.

At startup, the bot provides a detailed explanation of its purpose, capabilities, limitations, and information to support the project.

Reliable architecture:

Code written in Python using the asynchronous library python-telegram-bot.

A retry mechanism is implemented when calling the API to improve stability.

For security, tokens and API keys are stored in environment variables (.env).

Technologies and concepts:

Chatbot development

Integration with API (Google Gemini API)

Working with LLM (Large Language Models)

Prompt engineering

Asynchronous programming (Async/Await)

Error handling and stability (Error Handling, Retry logic)

Conversation state management (ConversationHandler)

Secure configuration storage