Stanford researchers launch talk therapy 'Woebot'
AI researchers and psychologists from Stanford University have launched Woebot, a chatbot that helps users manage their mental health. Woebot gathers mood data from text and emojis patients enter as part of daily chat conversations to offer personal responses and follow-ups for 10 minutes at a time. Modelled on cognitive behavioural therapy techniques, the chatbot encourages patients to talk about emotional responses to life events and identify instances that cause stress, anxiety and depression. Patients are less likely to fear being judged by a chatbot than they would by a human therapist, said Woebot CEO Alison Darcy.

Chatbots are taking over the world. Over the past few years, virtual help agents have taken on surprisingly sensitive jobs in modern society: counseling Syrian refugees fleeing civil war, creating quiet spaces of contemplation for millions of Chinese living in densely populated cities, and helping Australians access national disability benefits. Bots have offered help, support, and companionship. But there’s one line none of them have yet crossed: actually treating patients.

That’s just changed, with the release of a talk therapy chatbot that goes by … wait for it … Woebot. Created by a team of Stanford psychologists and AI experts, Woebot uses brief daily chat conversations, mood tracking, curated videos, and word games to help people manage mental health. After spending the last year building a beta and collecting clinical data, Woebot Labs Inc. just launched the full commercial product—a cheeky, personalized chatbot that checks on you once a day for the price of $39 a month.

Finding the time and money to pay for talk therapy sessions is out of reach for many, so a chatbot could be a helpful stopgap for psychiatry. But Woebot’s creators believe it has the potential to actually improve on human therapists. “It’s almost borderline illegal to say this in my profession, but there’s a lot of noise in human relationships,” says Alison Darcy, one of the psychologists behind Woebot, and the company’s CEO. “Noise is the fear of being judged. That’s what stigma really is.” There’s nothing like venting to an anonymous algorithm to lift that fear of judgement.

Of course, promising real medical results from a chatbot introduces new legal and ethical issues. While Woebot might seem like a person, it clearly tells patient that it’s actually closer to a “choose your own adventure self-help book.” Rather than running on machine learning technologies that would allow it to improvise on the fly, Woebot is much more deterministic. As it gathers mood data and processes any texts and emojis that a patient might enter, the bot traces the branches of a decision tree to offer personal responses and follow-ups for 10 minutes tops. Mostly, it asks questions.

“What is your energy like today?”

“How are you feeling?”

“What’s going on in your world right now?”

Those prompts are modeled on today’s most popular form of talk therapy—cognitive behavioral therapy—which asks people to recast their negative thoughts in a more objective light. Patients are encouraged to talk about their emotional responses to life events, and then stop to identify the psychological traps that cause their stress, anxiety, and depression. “A good CBT therapist should facilitate someone else’s process, not become a part of it,” says Darcy.

In some ways, a CBT chatbot is the ultimate manifestation of that philosophy. “Woebot is a robot you can tell anything to,” says Darcy. “It’s not an AI that’s going to tell you stuff you don’t know about yourself by detecting some magic you’re not even aware of.” Woebot only knows as much as you reveal to it—and it can only help as much as you decide to help yourself.