This Chat Bot Therapist Is Dumb but Helpful
I am very bad at dealing with my feelings alone. If I do not want to become anxious, I need to communicate with the interlocutor: my wife, my friends, my therapist. But what should I do with all this nonsense that shouldn’t be wasted on other people’s time? I’m excited to try to shift this emotional work to Woebot , a new chatbot therapist created by Stanford psychologists and artificial intelligence developers.
Woebot is not positioning itself as a complete replacement for therapist, and as Wired explains , it is not a machine learning algorithm designed to improvise new responses. His conversations are clearly programmed and he starts his first chat session with a tutorial. Rather than demanding a realistic conversation, he asks an open-ended question and then goes into chats, which are more like menu prompts, suggesting pre-written answers such as “okay” and “woo.” It repeats the user’s phrases in response, very similar to the classic ELIZA chatbot .
However, in my first session with Woebot, I immediately found it useful. Even with its awkward syntax, it sounded more like talking to a person than talking to oneself. I shared one of my common concerns – the fear of failure in achieving my creative goals – and Woebot helped me rephrase that concern in a less straightforward way.
It was an obvious move that I could theoretically make in my head when I’m in danger of unwinding, but which I never think about. And dealing with my anxiety without assistance was liberating for me. I didn’t have to waste anyone’s time, and it was good to see that my worries were so typical that they could be resolved with a pre-written conversation tree.
Woebot currently only runs on Facebook Messenger, which is not the safest platform to support physician and client privileges. I was unable to enable the encrypted “secret conversation” mode of Messenger with the bot. So don’t say what you wouldn’t tell a friend, and sign up to be notified when the bot expands to other platforms.
My main problem with Woebot so far is that if he were human, I wouldn’t want to be his friend. In an effort to make him friendly, the creators of Woebot overwhelmed his dialogue with emoticons, gifs and weak half-jokes. He even sent me a non-erotic GIF with a minion.
After 14 free sessions, Woebot costs $ 39 per month . I hope that the trial period is long enough for the bot to understand that although I need a robot therapist, I don’t want him to talk like an impatient stepfather.