Did you know about AI therapists?

The growing demand for the service is now being coupled with the growing technology to offer better services to those seeking help.

Hyderabad: Just a few years ago, seeking therapy in the first place was considered taboo. But these days, scores of individuals are coming forward to talk it out with their therapists.

The growing demand for the service is now being coupled with the growing technology to offer better services to those seeking help. And this is where artificial technology comes in.

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Multiple makers these days are creating AI tools that either provide therapy to individuals or play an instrumental role in sessions. Soon after the ChatGPT boom, all such tools came to the forefront and some are even adapting to them.

Grabbing the most attention is Rob Morris, co-founder of Koko, a non-profit that offers peer support to people. He tweeted, “We provided mental health support to about 4,000 people — using GPT-3.”

Their team asked GPT-3, the AI tool, answers to the questions their clients asked and they observed that “messages composed by AI (and supervised by humans) were rated significantly higher than those written by humans on their own”.

However, he also said that “once people learned the messages were co-created by a machine, it didn’t work”.

Also pioneering a new approach to mental healthcare is the use of natural-language processing (NLP). This tool basically analyses conversations between therapist and client, concentrating on which types of utterance and exchange seem to be most effective at treating different disorders.

This makes therapists’ jobs easier and helps them maintain a high standard of care, and proves to be a tool amid a global shortfall in mental healthcare.