Charming Therapeutic Chatbot Debuts on your FB Messenger
Created by a team of Stanford psychologists and AI experts, a therapeutic chatbot has finally arrived. Meet Woebot!
In 2017, Chatbots have become the new buzz and are being tried and tested to increase efficiency and reduce costs across industries.
Interestingly, the use of chatbots may no longer be limited to just tech, oil and finance industry.
Silicon Valley is stepping up the benefits of chatbots by giving them space to cure and treat mental disorders like depression and a study already shows that therapy in a chatbot may actually work.
A randomized controlled trial at Stanford University showed that college students aged 18–28 years had significant reductions in anxiety and depression. Those who chatted with this therapeutic Woebot, significantly reduced the symptoms of depression in 2 weeks. Woebot was introduced to the world on Facebook on Tuesday, June 6, 2017.
According to World Health Organization (WHO), more than 300 million people of all ages suffer from depression, which is a leading cause of mental disorder across the world, and affects more women than men.
But unfortunately for many of those suffering from depression, a counselor visit often becomes expensive depending on the number of sessions and the prescribed medications.
This is where Silicon Valley’s fresh approach to introduce Chatbots in order to treat depression is good news for families that have closed ones struggling from depression and finding treatments unaffordable.
Introduced as Woebot, a conversational chatbot has been built for young adults, most appropriate for those aged 18 and older. Permission of parents and guardians is needed if someone younger than 18 wants to sign up for it. Woebot is designed using natural language processing, therapeutic expertise, excellent writing, and even has a sense of humor! This therapeutic framework is said “to create the experience of a therapeutic conversation for all of the people that use him.”
Woebot has been introduced as a 24/7 helper and can track moods, give insights and teach stuff using cognitive-behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a talk therapy in a structured manner and is limited to number of sessions with either a psychotherapist or therapist. Woebot is a conversational chatbot and captures the shift in moods through graphs and displays the progress every week. It also looks for patterns that may be out of human scope. Woebot gradually learns about the users and the more the conversations are, the better Woebot understands the user.
By acting as an automated counselor, a therapy session from Woebot comes free for the first 14 sessions. The billing after these free sessions can be done weekly ($12/week), monthly ($39 monthly) or annually $312 annually).
To use Woebot, one requires a Facebook account in order to connect to Messenger. Interestingly, the tab with ‘Not on Facebook’ takes the user to Facebook so as to sign up for one. Once connected, conversations between Woebot and the user will not leave any public impression on the user’s Facebook profile or the news feed.
Though currently only available on Facebook Messenger, Woebot is working on becoming available on other messaging platforms. However, the target audience on Facebook itself is 2 billion and by debuting there, Woebot automatically becomes available to the world’s largest active social media platform.
