Acknowledgements: The Aselo Team, Annalise Irby, Nick Hurlburt, Dee Luo
Key Points
- AI summaries of helpline conversations are making counsellor workflows faster, reducing admin work and cutting repetitive documentation.
- Counsellors and supervisors find the summaries useful, because they are accurate, structured, and consistent.
- Classification experiments show that understanding counsellor workflows matters more than model accuracy alone.
- Globally-relevant AI advances can be accomplished without compromising trustworthy data practices.
Every day, helpline counsellors handle emotionally heavy conversations, sometimes lasting hours. Each conversation must be documented: writing summaries, selecting issue categories, filling out form fields, and preparing reports for supervisors or case managers.
Counsellors’ documentation, which we call helpline data entry, is critical. It protects callers, supports data quality and supervision, and surfaces trends across regions and countries. It is also time-consuming and mentally demanding, leaving counsellors less time for actual counselling.
We built Aselo, our open source contact center for these helplines to add text channels to traditionally voice helplines and to improve productivity of the counselors. One of the main areas for productivity improvements is reducing the time counselors spent on helpline data entry.
With generative AI tools, we saw an opportunity to do more: could we design AI tools that make counsellors’ work easier, faster, and more consistent, while preserving trust, privacy, and counsellor agency?
We focused on two features that lay the foundation for a fully automated Counsellor Data Entry Assistant.
- Summarization, which supports counsellors with structured, accurate summaries of a conversation.
- Issue categorization, which explores how AI can help streamline or automate the selection of presenting issues.
When we began building AI into Aselo, our guiding principle was to amplify counsellors’ work without compromising trust, data protection, or human judgment.
In this post, I share three key learnings from building AI tools for helplines, spanning data stewardship, human-in-the-loop summarization, and the limits of automated classification over large label sets. They reflect the technical challenges, the human-centered design decisions, and the operational principles that shaped our approach to responsible AI in helpline services.
Learning 1: Protecting Sensitive Data Builds Trust and Enables Innovation
Rather than limiting innovation, privacy and protection policies create a foundation for trustworthy collaboration and safe experimentation.
Working with sensitive helpline data means earning trust through clear, practical safeguards. One of Aselo’s founding principles was that helplines own their data. True to that principle, this AI work only included helplines who explicitly opted in. We were transparent about how their data would be used and who would have access. We adopted policies from the beginning that center data protection and privacy:
- Personally Identifiable Information (PII) redaction, which removes identifying details before any experimentation occurs.
- Zero data retention, meaning no conversational data is stored by models or model providers.
- Aselo’s already secure data infrastructure underpins all work.
With these safeguards in place, we could prototype AI data entry features such as summarization and issue categorization on small datasets. This approach gave partners confidence to collaborate, knowing that no conversational data would be stored or repurposed by third party service providers. OpenAI supported zero data retention for their models, enabling experimentation without retaining any data.
High-performing entity recognition tools, combined with trust built from careful data stewardship, enabled experimentation that preserved privacy. This approach protected sensitive data but also established the foundation for trustworthy AI tools that augment counsellor workflows responsibly.
Learning 2: AI Helps Write Summaries Faster While Preserving Counsellors’ Agency
LLM-assisted summaries can speed up data entry and support human judgment along with consistent documentation.
Following Aselo’s co-creation approach, we designed AI with counsellors in the loop, ensuring that automation supports helplines’ data entry needs.
AI Summaries Prototype
Before development, we ran a prototyping pilot that tested four types of summaries. These ranged from short, concise versions to longer, structured formats similar to formats used in training documents by helplines. We evaluated them using BLEU and ROUGE scores, LLM evaluators, and direct human ratings for accuracy and usefulness.
Longer and more structured summaries were preferred by human raters and by LLM-as-judge evaluators, showing early alignment between the two. They provided the clearest understanding of what happened during the contact. I also revisited the literature on evaluation metrics for natural language generation tasks like summarization, and spent time, for example, on Ehud Reiter’s blog reading about the current state of NLG evaluation as well as LLM-based evaluation methods (and shortcomings). From there, I developed helpline-specific indicators for quality and usefulness.
How Co-Design Shaped the Feature
We listened to counsellors and supervisors to understand how summaries fit within their workflow. They told us that they needed
- summaries that are transparent and editable,
- support for long and trauma-heavy conversations,
- and reduction in time spend reviewing and correcting summaries.
Based on this feedback, we created a one-click summarization tool that produces an editable three-paragraph summary directly within Aselo. This feedback informed design choices such as keeping counsellors in the loop, ensuring transparency, and embedding AI features securely.
Early Impact in the Beta Test
We evaluated the feature with a mixed methods approach. We tracked accuracy ratings, edits to summaries, user engagement, supervisor feedback, and wrap-up times (time spent entering data after a call ends). We adapted the four-tiered AI evaluation system developed by The Agency Fund and the Center for Global Development to track technical and human-centered metrics.
What happened? Here is what we observed:
- Counsellors rated AI-supported summaries as highly accurate and more standardized across their peers.
- Supervisors noticed that the format, structure, and quality of summaries became more consistent across their workforce of counsellors.
- Counsellors edited some of the AI-generated summaries, which showed active engagement, but often used them largely unchanged.
- And most importantly, we saw more chats with short wrap-up times.
When counsellors marked a summary as Not Accurate, it was usually because the conversation was very brief, and a three-paragraph summary didn’t make sense. In response to this feedback, our next version of the feature has taken the length of the interaction into account to generate appropriate summaries.
These findings are early indicators that the feature is meaningfully augmenting counsellors’ work, maintaining human judgment and accuracy while improving efficiency.
Chart: Summary Accuracy Ratings During Test Window
Around 60% of AI-generated summaries were rated by Counsellors during the Beta Test window, and of these, most were rated Very accurate (81%).
Call wrap-up times chart
There was a higher proportion of chats with wrap-up times under 30 seconds when Counsellors used the AI feature, and a fewer proportion of chat wrap-ups that took 2-60 minutes (a small, but statistically significant, effect).
Learning 3: Classification Is a Counsellor Workflow Challenge, Not Just a Model Challenge
Task definition shapes model performance, and human workflow shapes task definition.
Our initial focus on using generative AI technology was helpline issue categorization. This seemed like a straightforward classification problem: pick the top three issues that came up in a conversation from a list of topics. We thought this would translate to significant productivity improvements, but this proved more challenging than expected.
In practice, counsellors handle hundreds of live calls each week, and most use a small set of familiar categories. Remembering definitions and navigating long lists while keeping up with emerging issue trends is the real challenge.
What we tested
We ran zero-shot and few-shot experiments with GPT-4o-mini using fully redacted transcripts. We compared the results to a baseline that always selected the three most common labels. The model outperformed the baseline for two of three helplines, and performance improved further when we grouped labels into broader themes.
On paper, this looked like progress. Even simple AI-assisted classification improved accuracy while reducing cognitive load. Yet the results did not fully align with what counsellors needed. The technical improvements revealed that prediction alone was not enough to make the process truly useful.
What counsellors taught us was reflected in data
I had assumed that the issue classification task was cognitively demanding. For example, one helpline uses 163 possible categories, and counsellors choose up to three issue categories for each contact. But counsellors shared something that surprised us. They do not find the 163-category list overwhelming; they mostly use a small set of familiar categories.
The real difficulty comes from remembering the definitions of similar or overlapping labels and navigating long lists required for reporting.
The data confirmed this pattern. Across helplines, roughly two-thirds of labels came from the ten most frequently used categories, and the remaining categories (up to 150) formed a long tail and are rarely used.
A promising direction
Helplines explained that they sometimes create new issue categories after noticing patterns in free-text summaries during data reviews. This highlighted a promising direction for AI: supporting the evolution of category sets by recognizing issues emerging from new summaries. Our focus shifted from predicting issue categories to understanding how these categories evolve, and considering how to design tools that support that evolution. The next phase for categorization efforts pauses AI experimentation to focus on co-designing categorization approaches with helplines, grounded in counsellors’ actual workflows. AI isn’t the most essential tool for this challenge, but it did help us discover what is essential: in this case, strengthening data collection practices.
Looking Ahead: Counsellor AI Assistant that Scales
Our next phase involves scaling the Counsellor AI Assistant across the entire data entry and case management workflow. This includes exploring automated entry of form fields while continuing to strengthen secure data pipelines and test AI models hosted fully within our infrastructure.
What we have found is that the most valuable AI features are those that assist counsellors in their workflow, promote agency about which data is recorded, and maintain transparency at every step. By embedding safeguards, incorporating human feedback, and continually evaluating outcomes, we can scale AI data entry responsibly while preserving counsellor agency and the quality of their interactions with children and families.
This direction aligns with Aselo’s broader strategy to strengthen the helpline ecosystem across four goals: improving counsellor experience, enhancing data quality, expanding insight into caller’s needs, and increasing global reach. To us, responsible AI in helplines is not about replacing people. It is about amplifying their impact, ensuring that every call is well-documented, every counsellor is supported, and that the system is built to be effective for people to spend time supporting people in crisis.
We would like to especially thank Safe Online and The Agency Fund for their financial support of this project, and would like to thank OpenAI for agreeing to zero data retention and the provision of in-kind credits.
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Reading the findings
You can download the summary of key findings as well as the full evaluation report below.
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11th International Consultation of Child Helplines – Livingstone, Zambia
Nick Hurlburt, Executive Director
The Aselo team was thrilled to participate in the event. In addition to getting a rare chance to reconnect in-person with many of our existing helpline partners and learn from members of the helpline movement on their current successes and challenges, we also took an active part in the programming, helping organize two events:
- The Day 0 technology event, convening helplines to focus on shared technology needs and solutions.
- A plenary session on AI, moderated by Tech Matters founder Jim Fruchterman, which explored both opportunities and cautions in applying AI to helpline work.
Day 0: Building Technology for Child Helplines
After the success of our Day 0 event at the last International Consultation in Stockholm in 2022, Tech Matters hosted another Day 0 event prior to the main conference, devoted to helpline technology. More than 40 participants filled the room, ready to exchange ideas and experiences. This year’s focus was “Innovation to meet needs when resources are tight.” Funding cuts and growing demand have forced helplines to innovate, and Day 0 provided a chance to showcase what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next.
Three helplines shared concrete examples of how they are adapting technology to serve children better:
- Therese Garmestedt (BRIS, Sweden) presented on AI-powered content moderation for peer forums. By automating the flagging of inappropriate content, BRIS can ensure that young people have a safe space to connect online, even when staff resources are stretched. Importantly, no AI is in direct contact with children; humans always supervise.
- Pietro Compagnoni (Telefono Azzurro, Italy) described how a VoiceBot/ChatBot system now handles initial triaging for incoming calls. Before, counsellors were required to read terms and conditions aloud to every caller, a process that could take seven minutes before any real help began. With the chatbot in place, low-priority calls dropped from 80% to 20%. Children who need to speak to a counsellor are still connected, but counsellors no longer lose time on non-pertinent calls.
- Madeleine van der Bruggen (Offlimits, Netherlands) shared how her team built a data warehouse to integrate information from across their programs. This “early warning” system enables them to spot trends more quickly and to advocate effectively with policymakers and media.
Following the presentations, the group wrestled with questions that many helplines face:
- How to balance automation with the need for human oversight?
- Could youth panels help identify new slang or terms so that AI systems better reflect the realities of children’s lives?
- What models exist to train counsellors with AI, perhaps through simulated conversations or scenario-based learning?
The discussion also underscored how difficult it can be to scale tools across languages and cultural contexts. Participants noted both the promise and the challenge of building AI tools that work in multilingual environments without defaulting to English.
Key Takeaways
Day 0 reinforced that helplines are at the forefront of innovation, even under tight constraints. Peer-to-peer learning was evident in every discussion, with helplines borrowing ideas from one another. While challenges remain—particularly in scaling AI across contexts and harmonizing data—helplines are committed to making technology work for children rather than the other way around.
Session on AI: Optimistic and Cautionary Tales
The plenary session “Child Helplines, Increased Digitalisation & AI – Optimistic and Cautionary Tales” was moderated by Tech Matters’ founder Jim Fruchterman. Jim framed the conversation by noting that while AI offers helplines powerful tools to improve efficiency and reach, its use raises crucial questions of ethics, privacy, and the preservation of human connection.
Panelists included Tony Fitzgerald (yourtown, Australia), Hana Hrpka (Hrabri Telefon, Croatia), Sahil Rekhi (Graia), and Jeroo Billimoria (Child Helpline International).
Across the panel, a consensus emerged: AI can reduce counsellor burden, improve efficiency, and expand access. But AI must be carefully managed, transparent, and rooted in child protection values.
In Partnership with Child Helplines
The Zambia consultation highlighted three intertwined themes: helplines must continue innovating with technology, carefully explore AI’s promise while guarding against its risks, and invest in data systems that elevate their voice on the national and global stage.
For Aselo, these themes are core to our mission. We are committed to supporting helplines with tools that are affordable, adaptable, and built for the realities of their work. Whether through shared technology exploration on Day 0, thoughtful engagement with AI, or strengthening data for advocacy, we see each step as part of a collective effort to ensure children everywhere can find help when they need it most.
CrisisCon: The National Crisis Continuum Conference – Indianapolis, USA
Nick Hurlburt, Executive Director
It was a great pleasure to return to Indiana (where I went to college) for Aselo’s third visit to the CrisisCon conference. CrisisCon is the annual event in the United States that focuses on the crisis continuum – the chain of services often described as “Someone to Contact” (helplines and hotlines), “Someone to Respond” (mobile crisis teams), and “A Safe Place for Help” (crisis care and stabilization centers). In Aselo’s origins in the international child helpline space, the first of those was really the only one on our radar. As we have increased our presence in the U.S.-specific context, for example in our unarmed crisis response partnership with the City of Los Angeles and Trek Medics, we’ve become more familiar with this continuum.
CrisisCon was an opportunity to see familiar faces and create new connections. This was the first visit where we could speak about an existing U.S. customer base, which is quite a milestone! We see tremendous opportunity to continue to grow and support this field, collaborating with multiple organizations across the continuum.
EMental Health International Collaborative (eMHIC) Congress 2025 – Toronto, Canada
Nick Hurlburt, Executive Director
I’ve found it interesting over the years in our work with the international child helpline movement that even though mental health is the most common issue that children bring to helplines, most of the conferences, meetings, and collaborations that we participate in are focused on violence against children (which is still a critical issue, and a strong second in commonality!). Therefore I looked forward to attending the eMHIC Congress – our first global conference focused on mental health technology – in order to go beyond the helpline space to capture a broader view of how technology is being used across the entire global mental health care ecosystem. This conference, sponsored in part by our partner Kids Help Phone, brought together representatives from government mental health departments, technology regulators, nonprofits, mental health app developers, researchers, and many others.
It was so interesting to see how many different countries are seeing similar challenges and working toward similar solutions. I had the opportunity to present our work on Aselo and how we co-created a successful technology solution alongside the global child helpline movement, and it was so exciting to speak to how we solved the challenges that I was seeing. In the talk, I focused on four principles that guide our work:
- Co-creation (with our partner helplines)
- One global product with local adaptation
- Shared, open contributions
- Data empowerment (we don’t own the data, though standards-based, deidentified data sharing can help the whole community!)
These principles aligned well with what I heard from many voices at the event. We all come from very diverse backgrounds, but there are many similarities to the challenges we face. Rather than operating in silos, finding shared models and practices that value local differences can help us all confront these challenges.
2025 G20 Summit – Johannesburg, South Africa
Humairaa Mahomed, Partnerships Manager
The High-level Roundtable on Financing Safe Digital Futures for Children, held during the G20 Social Summit in Johannesburg, brought together over 70 participants from governments across Africa and Latin America, alongside regional bodies, international agencies, the private sector, NGOs, academia, media, survivors, youth, and children.
Representatives from 35 institutions discussed the urgent need to embed digital safety as a core pillar of digital transformation in order to build inclusive and sustainable digital economies. A clear message emerged – child online safety remains under-prioritised in current global investment flows, despite rapidly growing digital harms. Reflecting on current and future planned projects across the organisations present, all speakers emphasised the importance of governmental leadership, cross-sector collaboration, survivor and youth engagement, and innovative, blended financing approaches.
As the Aselo representative in Dialogue II of the session: Financing and Integrating Cost-Effective Solutions, I highlighted the fact that Tech Matters was one of the only technology organisations present at a conversation related to the digital world. This opportunity allowed me to stress the need to move beyond framing technology as the problem, instead advancing “safety by design” through collaboration with technologically skilled organisations, and – most importantly – leveraging networks like Aselo, other global existing policies and best practices to accelerate the pace of efforts to keep up with the exponential growth of digital spaces and associated harms.
The Third Richest Nation initiative by the Brave Movement was highlighted as a compelling, data-driven tool for engaging funders. The session concluded with renewed momentum for the Safe Digital Futures – Invest in Children Coalition, which Aselo is part of and an Open Letter calling on G20 nations to invest urgently in child online safety drafted, with partners set to reconvene in early 2026.
Looking Ahead to 2026
These conferences reinforced our commitment to building technology that serves children and the organizations dedicated to protecting them. As we look toward 2026, we’re excited to continue participating in global conversations that shape the future of child protection, crisis response, and mental health support.
Interested in learning more about how Aselo is supporting helplines and crisis response organizations worldwide? Visit us at aselo.org or reach out to our team at [email protected] to explore how we can support your organization’s mission.
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Contents
- Year Overview by Nick Hurlburt, Executive Director of Aselo
- Impact by the Numbers and Key Insights
- Global Partnerships
- Partner Spotlights
- A Case Study (Youthline)
- Looking Ahead
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]]>Trek Medics and Tech Matters Partner with the City of Los Angeles to Transform Crisis Response for Unhoused Individuals
LOS ANGELES, September 23, 2025— In a groundbreaking collaboration, nonprofit technology organizations Trek Medics and Tech Matters have partnered to deliver a custom-built crisis response platform for the City of Los Angeles to support unarmed response to crises involving the city’s unhoused population.
This partnership brings together Trek Medics’ expertise in emergency dispatching with Tech Matters’ extensive experience in crisis hotline management. The result is a real-time, interoperable platform that enables the City of Los Angeles’ CIRCLE program (Crisis and Incident Response through Community-Led Engagement) to coordinate efficiently between unarmed crisis responders during homelessness-related incidents. The system leverages cloud-based call handling, geospatial data, and mobile tools for crisis responders to help ensure people in crisis receive timely, appropriate support and access to services — whether that means access to mental health services, shelter or referrals to other City services.
With homeless service providers spread out across the City of Los Angeles, the unarmed crisis response teams needed a smarter, faster way to coordinate operations in order to respond to the most urgent needs of Los Angeles’ unhoused population. This new platform provides the City’s teams with the tools to act quickly, collaboratively, and with compassion.
Funded through the Mayor’s Office of Community Safety (MOCS), the initiative aims to set a new standard for municipal crisis response. Since its launch on April 1, the CIRCLE program has averaged nearly 2,500 crisis responses per month in seven operating areas across the city.
“Our mission has always been to improve access to critical services for vulnerable populations through our Beacon Crisis Dispatch platform,” said Jason Friesen, executive director of Trek Medics. “Together with Tech Matters, we’re making it possible for Los Angeles to respond to those experiencing homelessness with the urgency, dignity, and coordination they deserve.”
“Through our collaboration with the City of Los Angeles and Trek Medics, we’ve created a new model together,” said Nick Hurlburt, the executive director of the Aselo contact center program at Tech Matters. “This new model for crisis dispatch can be replicated widely in cities working to provide critical supports and better response to people experiencing homelessness.
For more information, please contact:
Josué Díaz-Berrios
Trek Medics International
[email protected]
(213) 555-4832
Joyce Johannson
Tech Matters
[email protected]
About Trek Medics Intl
Trek Medics is a nonprofit technology organization that builds the Beacon Crisis Dispatch platform, used by emergency and crisis response agencies to alert, coordinate and track local response networks using readily-available mobile technologies. Trek Medics is an Equal Opportunity Affirmative Action Employer. Learn more at trekmedics.org.
About Tech Matters
Tech Matters is a nonprofit organization that builds Aselo, an open source contact center platform built specifically for the needs of crisis hotlines and helplines. Tech Matters’ other social impact projects include Terraso, an open source platform designed to provide community leaders with software tools to address local sustainability, and the Better Deal for Data, a standard for social impact data sharing. Learn more at techmatters.org.
About CIRCLE
CIRCLE, which stands for Crisis and Incident Response through Community-led Engagement, is a 24/7 unarmed response program that deploys trained teams to address non-urgent LAPD calls related to unhoused individuals. CIRCLE is managed through the City of Los Angeles’ Mayor’s Office of Community Safety (MOCS). Learn more at: mayor.lacity.gov.
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]]>View the Solutions Storytelling Project documentary highlighting our work with helpline partner Línea Libre.
By Alejandro Rivera, Senior Solutions Engineer
Today I saw my 5-year-old daughter running through the garden yelling, “Abu! Abu!” (short for Abuela, grandmother). “Look! We are picking murtas!” (Murta is a small berry type of fruit that can be harvested in Autumn here in Chile. They have a very unique floral and sweet flavor.)
Her abu says to her: “Oh my, these are lovely!”
My daughter replies with excitement: “Yes, abu! I’m going to prepare a dessert with these. I’ll mix them with other fruits and orange juice!”
These little moments that I get to see, watching my daughter’s genuine and pure feeling of happiness, make my day.
The feeling fades away quickly though. As I look back at my computer screen, I see the reports that I am preparing for our Aselo helpline partners to submit to the annual Child Helpline International data collection survey. The reports reveal the complex issues that so many children struggle with, each issue a burden too heavy to bear in silence. Many of these children turn to helplines when they don’t know who else to talk to. The most common issue for which children seek assistance: Mental Health.
In Chile, for example, close to 60% of the helpline contacts received by Línea Libre (a free national helpline service for young people which uses our Aselo system) from children up to 15 years old are about mental health related issues, ranging from anxiety to thoughts of suicide. This is a trend we are seeing from most of our helpline partners using Aselo around the world — the data shows that around half of all contacts from young people relate to mental health concerns. This is a striking proportion, especially considering that mental health is just one among ten or more categories of assistance typically offered by helplines.
While mental health is “the big problem,” there are others, like violence, which includes sexual abuse, bullying, and domestic violence. Twenty percent of the contacts from youth pertain to reports of violence.
These issues are highlighted in a short documentary produced by The Video Consortium’s Solutions Storytelling Project. Created by Chilean filmmaker Nicole Kramm, the documentary shares stories from Línea Libre helpline counselors who support thousands of Chilean youth with the help of Aselo, our cloud-based omnichannel helpline software. Hopefully this documentary will bring more awareness to the dire and evolving issues facing young people and the day-to-day challenges helplines face to be able to respond to the needs of children in crisis
There is good news though: I’ve seen a growing movement of child helpline initiatives around the world that are working to fight this crisis on a daily basis powered by their most valuable resource: counselors.
Counselors are the heroes that nobody hears of. Unrecognized and unappreciated, they spend their days or work overnight shifts giving counsel to our kids; they listen and provide guidance to every child, youth, or even adult seeking assistance through local helplines. They are present, with empathy and without judgement, when kids don’t know who to reach out to and feel they don’t have anyone else. These are people who must build tremendous psychological strength because the burden is heavy, and it piles up over time with no end in sight. Yet they continue to fight on the front lines of this crisis, unyielding and unwavering.
Sadly, many helplines struggle to stay afloat, particularly in Latin America and Africa. The lack of funding and resources have forced helplines to reduce their operating hours and/or reduce their staff. In countries like Chile, governments have not provided the financial support that these helplines need, in spite of the fact that helplines are providing an important public/social service and have a profound positive impact in our society. With more financial support, helplines would be able to expand and have the capacity to help even more children
Helplines should be focusing on how to improve their services or reach more children, instead of worrying about how or if they can continue to operate in the next few months.
Today, at lunch, I saw my daughter trying the dessert she prepared. She starts dancing with her shoulders while eating it and that means: “it is delicious”. My wife and I tried it, too; we looked at each other and we started dancing as well. We all laughed.
Don’t all kids deserve this, too?
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]]>Kids Help Phone and Tech Matters join forces to innovate youth mental health services across Canada, and further modernize child helplines globally
TORONTO, Nov. 20 – Kids Help Phone (KHP), Canada’s only 24/7, free, multilingual e-mental health service for youth, is partnering with Silicon Valley-based nonprofit Tech Matters to revolutionize services for young people in Canada and around the world. This collaboration centers around KHP’s leading investment in Aselo®, a foundational technology platform that meets the unique needs of helpline counsellors providing digital mental health services. This investment in purpose-built technology and the improvements in the Aselo platform that have been co-designed with KHP’s frontline staff. Each feature that is built into Aselo originates from feedback provided directly by counsellors and supervisors, ensuring that the technology continues to adapt to the needs of the helpline. These advancements have also been rolled out to child helplines around the world.
KHP and the Canadian funders behind this transformational work are playing a leading role in changing the future of the global helpline community. With KHP’s investment, Aselo gives child helplines around the world state-of-the-art technology tools to strengthen the work of their frontline staff and build reliable communication channels between the helplines and young people seeking help. This initiative aims to modernize child helplines worldwide, with the goal of doubling the number of young people who can be served.
“As an innovative, data driven, tech leader in youth mental health in Canada and globally, KHP is committed to building and scaling meaningful solutions for youth mental health,” said KHP President & CEO Katherine Hay. “Our partnership with Tech Matters has been focused on addressing the urgent needs of young people reaching out to KHP in Canada while supporting helplines globally. Aselo is transforming not only our ability to respond to young people, it’s also elevating the voice of frontline staff, enabling them to express and shape what they need to increase their effectiveness. Aselo – and the partnership with Tech Matters – is a game changer. It’s also gratifying that the advancements we’ve co-created can benefit helplines the world over.”
By building technology exclusively for crisis response helplines, Tech Matters ensures counsellors play a significant role in shaping the platform’s features and functionality. A key benefit of using Aselo is that it streamlines the workflow of Kids Help Phone’s frontline staff, giving counsellors one unified platform to engage in voice calls, conduct web chat counseling, capture counselling data records, and search for relevant resources to share with service users. By providing a more efficient and reliable platform for counselling, frontline staff can better focus their efforts on the work that can’t be replaced by technology providing effective and empathetic support to those in crisis.
“Child helplines have unique requirements that generic call center software cannot address effectively,” said Jim Fruchterman, the founder and CEO of Tech Matters. “The common needs of helplines are clear, such as making the best use of trained counsellors, their most important asset, while prioritizing the safety and privacy of young people and their data. As nonprofit technologists, our mission is served by providing tools to expert nonprofits such as Kids Help Phone, who are directly serving those people most in need of help.”
As part of their work together, KHP and Tech Matters have co-developed features for Aselo including the development of multi-language webchat support, creation of an integrated resource database that makes it easier for counsellors to search and refer helpline users to community resources, and the ability to transfer helpline users to external resources, such as emergency services.
Aselo was first adopted by the child helpline in Zambia in 2021. Today the platform is being used by child helplines in more than 15 countries and on every inhabited continent.
FAST FACTS FROM KHP and TECH MATTERS
- Kids Help Phone has supported young people over 21 million times since the onset of COVID-19 — this number increases every day.
- On average 75 percent of young people share something with Kids Help Phone they’ve never shared with anyone else.
- On average 88 percent of young people feel better after connecting with Kids Help Phone.
- Tech Matters is currently working with child helplines in Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ethiopia, Hungary, India, Jamaica, Malawi, Malta, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
ADDITIONAL QUOTES
“Canada is failing youth. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among our young people. Our goal is to put youth at the centre, and transform the delivery and accessibility of digital mental health solutions. Through our partnership with Tech Matters, Kids Help Phone is empowering Canada’s young people to get immediate, equitable, and effective support for any mental health challenge they face,” said Katherine Hay, President & CEO, Kids Help Phone.
“Our goal at Tech Matters is to bring great technology to meet the urgent needs of nonprofits. Demands on the crisis helpline movement are rapidly increasing, with young people in particular facing an enormous range of challenges. KHP has shared critical insights and innovations which they are happy to generously share to help modernize child helplines, making them more responsive to children in crisis around the world,” said Jim Fruchterman, founder & CEO of Tech Matters.
About Kids Help Phone
Kids Help Phone is Canada’s only 24/7 national, e-mental health service offering free, confidential, multi-lingual support to young people. As the country’s virtual care expert, we give millions of youth a safe, trusted space to Feel Out Loud over the phone, through text, or in self-directed supports for any moment of crisis or need. The Feel Out Loud campaign is the largest movement for youth mental health in Canada’s history – it will raise $300 million to unlock hope for young people to thrive in their worlds. Kids Help Phone gratefully relies on the generosity of donors, volunteers, stakeholder partners, corporate partners and governments to fuel and fund our programs. Learn more at KidsHelpPhone.ca.
About Tech Matters
Tech Matters is a nonprofit organization that leverages the power of tech to support social sector innovators and advance large-scale positive social change. Tech Matters’ team includes tech experts working from eight countries with a passion for social justice and a commitment to further positive social change. As tech nerds for the social sector, Tech Matters creates common ground for systems change solutions, empowering progress on humanity’s most pressing social issues.
In addition to developing Aselo, Tech Matters also developed and launched TerrasoTM, an open source platform designed to provide community leaders with software tools to address the effects of climate change and sustainability at the local level. The nonprofit also produces the “Tech Matters” podcast series featuring interviews with successful tech social entrepreneurs. Learn more at TechMatters.org and follow us on LinkedIn.
For more information, please contact:
Kids Help Phone
Brielle Goulart, Media Relations & Influencer Engagement
[email protected]
Tech Matters/Aselo
Joyce Johannson, Senior Advisor
[email protected]
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]]>Exploring tech for child helplines
We recently co-hosted with Child Helpline International a special virtual event for national child helplines to explore technology advances that will empower these groups to do more for the world’s children (view the slide deck for the event here). This workshop built on a previous event we hosted in late 2022 in Stockholm, Sweden, which was very well-received by child helplines. The helpline community assists many millions of children and it is no surprise that better technology is needed to continue scaling their ability to serve.
Of course, no conversation like this can happen in 2024 without talking about AI. And, there’s no more important voice to trust than your peers in the field. We talked about AI and heard from several tech helpline leaders about how they are using AI effectively today.
The roles AI and humans play for helplines
I kicked off the session with an AI overview entitled “The Future of Tech for Child Helplines is: Humans!” The essence of helplines is empathetic human-to-human contact, and our tech applications need to support and enhance that human connection. Helplines often hold critically important datasets by and about children in their countries because of the unique position they hold in their communities. We need to use that data for better assisting children in need, while also securing that data to protect it from misuse (and harms to the children whose data is captured).
There are exciting AI applications ahead: better hearing the collective voice of children, handling routine tasks to enable helpline counselor efficiency, supporting and training counselors, intelligent routing and triage, better quality and faster data collection, and more. I highlighted the importance of the network, and shared that our Aselo team is partnering with multiple helplines in North America, the Caribbean and Africa to build open source AI technology together. Our learnings and the resulting software will be freely available to all Child Helpline International member helplines. AI is not cheap or easy to develop, and joint action and knowledge sharing is critical.
AI Initiatives for Child Helplines
Darren Mastropaolo, the VP of Innovation and Data at Kids Help Phone, Canada’s national child helpline, shared their vision of AI for Canadian children and youth. Their dream is to have AI assist in personalized recommendations, not to sell products, but to assist help seekers on their wellness journey. They already have developed an AI-powered tool (in partnership with the Vector Institute, Canada’s leading AI institution) to identify the primary issue discussed in a text conversation with over 90% accuracy. In addition, they plan to use data to identify service deserts: communities with a high burden of youth need without adequate local services to meet those needs.
Charlotte Smerup from Børns Vilkår, the Danish national child helpline, presented their AI initiatives. They have created a Counselor’s Assistant, which is a guide by the side providing real-time helpful hints to volunteer counselors based on AI-identified topics in active conversations. As a leader from a peer helpline, Charlotte gave her realistic assessment of both opportunities and challenges with AI. She noted that a lot of good quality data is necessary, that it’s essential to invest in anonymization to address privacy concerns, and that AI innovation is expensive. Her team have been working on AI applications now for about five years, and feel that it has been a boost for their programs.
Our closing speaker was Sam Dorison, cofounder of ReflexAI. His company is a spin-off from the Trevor Project, which operates a crisis response helpline for LGBTQ+ young people. Sam and his co-founder had pioneered the use of AI for training volunteers several years ago, and they wanted to bring this capability to a greater range of helplines (including for veterans). They focus on using AI to improve quality of helplines, both for training and ongoing feedback. He pointed out the importance of role-playing in volunteer training, and mentioned an issue that hadn’t occurred to me. Not only do training simulators reduce demands on the limited number of experienced human trainers, but he pointed out that role-playing a suicidal teen day-in and day-out was psychologically wearing for their trainers. The AI simulators increased the number of volunteers trained as well as improved the mental health of crisis helpline trainers.
AI as a tool to help counselors and young people contacting helplines
The excitement in AI’s potential was balanced with reality checks from AI-using organizations with years of real-world experience. Nobody was advocating to fire humans and replace them with robots. Everyone was trying to use the technology to help real human beings, both the young people in need as well as the counselors helping them. I’m looking forward to the next time we bring this kind of expertise together in the coming years to share their latest learnings!
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]]>Leveraging AI tools is a powerful way to help meet increased needs for behavioral health support if we can avoid the dangers. So, how can you use AI for good in your organization?
…AI today realizes neither our greatest hopes nor our worst fears, but it can do real good or harm. Start with clear problem identification, examine the best uses and types of AI to fit your needs, consider data privacy and ethics, weigh costs and benefits, and keep staff involved to ensure the tools are safe and effective. Always keep in mind what’s best for the people you serve, or in the words of the AI film character Tron: “I fight for the users!”
Read the full article at Behavioral Health News.
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]]>At Aselo, we’re continuously working to expand and improve our services to better support crisis helplines around the globe. Here we take a minute to share some highlights from the past year.
New Helplines in Canada, Singapore, and New Zealand
We’re thrilled to announce that helplines in Canada, Singapore, and New Zealand have adopted Aselo in the last year. This expansion allows us to support our partners in helping more young people in need. We’ve added new features to support the needs of our latest helplines including a resource database, support for external call conferencing, extended case management functionality, and much more. Any of our helplines can take advantage of these new features due to Aselo’s collaborative model. We look forward to the extended impact we can make together with these helplines and our existing helpline partners.
Voice Integration with the Aselo Connector
We’ve just introduced an exciting new device called the Aselo Connector. This innovative technology solves a major telephony challenge for areas of the world where internet connectivity can be limited and cloud-based VoIP solutions don’t perform well. The Aselo Connector combines the advanced features of our cloud platform with keeping voice calls completely on local networks for higher voice quality. This new development, which was developed in close partnership with Lifeline Childline Zambia and Childline Zimbabwe, enables more helplines to use Aselo as a “single pane of glass” to manage all their voice and text channels in one application, providing a better experience for helpline counsellors and help seekers.
Features to Manage Repeat Callers
In our Future of Tech for Child Helplines workshop alongside the 10th International Consultation of Child Helpline International in 2022, one big theme was the struggle with repeat and abusive callers. Helplines noted that up to a quarter of their capacity was consumed by repeat callers, some with complex needs and others who misused the service. In response, we recently launched a new feature on Aselo, Client Profiles, which allows helplines to recognize and track repeat callers. With Aselo’s customizable approach, helplines can choose how they wish to respond: they can transfer these callers to experienced staff, block them, or keep their counselling staff up to date on important information regarding the callers.
300,000 Contacts!
Last month, we surpassed 300,000 contacts in Aselo since our first production launch in 2021. Contacts in Aselo in 2024 have already exceeded the total for 2023, and we are on track to exceed one million contacts in the next year. We are thankful for the opportunity to work with so many amazing helpline partners around the world and we look forward to expanding and helping more people in crisis with the best technology available.
Leadership Transition: Nick Hurlburt as Executive Director
We are pleased to announce that Nick Hurlburt has transitioned into the role of Executive Director of Aselo. Nick has led Aselo’s technology efforts from the first proof-of-concept demo to becoming a global platform, and we are eager to see him lead us into this new chapter. With his guidance, we are confident that Aselo will continue to grow and make a significant impact in the communities we serve.
Dee Luo, our Director of Product & Operations, is also expanding her role, taking on our UX design and telecom implementation programs. Tech Matters’ CEO, Jim Fruchterman, continues to play an active role in Aselo’s success especially in fundraising and key partnerships.
These updates reflect Aselo’s commitment to improving and growing our services to better support those in need. We are grateful for the continued support of our partners and the dedication of our team as we work together to help people in crisis!
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