ReachOut – Mental Health Chatbot Backend

This is the backend engine powering ReachOut, an AI-driven mental health chatbot designed to provide empathetic support, document-based Q&A, and crisis detection. The backend integrates multiple AI models and services to enable safe, responsive, and intelligent mental health assistance.

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Features

• Conversational Engine: Uses Gemini API for empathetic responses to user queries.
• Document Q&A Engine: Powered by LlamaIndex, enabling document retrieval and answering based on mental health resources.
• Crisis Detection Module: Scans user input for crisis-related signals and triggers automated safety protocols.
• HuggingFace Embeddings: Generates semantic embeddings for queries to enhance document retrieval.
• Custom Logging: Tracks user sessions and logs interactions for auditing and safety purposes.

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Tech Stack

• Framework: FastAPI (Python)
• AI Integrations:
  • Gemini API (chat responses)
  • LlamaIndex (document querying)
  • HuggingFace Sentence Transformers (embeddings)
• Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK): Tokenization and text preprocessing.
• Logging: Custom logging system for auditing interactions.

Setup Instructions

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/your-username/reachout-backend.git
cd reachout-backend

Set up a virtual environment (recommended)

For Linux / Mac:

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

For Windows:

python -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate

Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the FastAPI server

uvicorn main:app --reload

Environment Variables

The following environment variables need to be set in AWS Amplify:

# Python Runtime
PYTHON_VERSION=3.9.12

# Application Settings
PORT=8080
NLTK_DATA=/tmp/nltk_data

# Model Settings
TRANSFORMERS_NO_TF=1
TOKENIZERS_PARALLELISM=false

Deployment

1. AWS Amplify Console Setup:

   • Go to App settings → Environment variables
   • Add all required environment variables
   • Build settings will use amplify.yml
   • Monitor builds in the Deploy tab

2. Custom Domain (Optional):

   • Set up in Domain management
   • SSL certificate provided automatically

3. Monitoring:

   • View logs in Deploy tab
   • Real-time monitoring in App settings → Monitoring