HopeBot: An AI-Powered Mental Health Chatbot Built to Support College Students

Mental health strongly affects college students’ well-being and academic performance. As social pressure and campus life become more stressful, mental health problems are increasing, and there are still not many effective ways to assess and support students. In this paper, we present HopeBot, an AI-powered mental health chatbot that gives students a private space to share their feelings and receive supportive guidance. HopeBot uses Amazon Lex to understand user messages, Amazon Bedrock to generate responses, and Amazon S3 to store mental health resources. The main aim is to make emotional support, easy to access, especially during difficult times. Based on system testing and user feedback, HopeBot gives accurate, helpful, and emotionally sensitive responses, with 91.4% accuracy, an average response time of 850 ms, and a user satisfaction score of 4.6 out of 5. These results demonstrates that HopeBot can be a useful tool for supporting student mental health.