How data scientists are using AI for suicide prevention

Deciding whom to help first can be a life-or-death decision. At the Crisis Text Line, a text messaging-based crisis counseling hotline, these deluges have the potential to overwhelm the human staff. So data scientists at Crisis Text Line are using machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, to pull out the words and emojis that can signal a person at higher risk of suicide ideation or self-harm. The computer tells them who on hold needs to jump to the front of the line to be helped. They can do this because Crisis Text Line does something radical for a crisis counseling service: It collects a massive amount of data on the 30 million texts it has exchanged with users.