Alex Ossola
speaker
124 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 4d ago
Alex Ossola’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
One of those is from Talkspace, a company founded in twenty twelve to connect people to real therapists online.
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Earlier this summer, Talkspace launched an AI tool called T.
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It's intended to be an AI chatbot that people can talk to about their problems, whether they need to vent after a stressful day at work or address a particular anxiety that's keeping them up at night.
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Access to it costs $20 a month.
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Here's what Talkspace CEO John Cohen told me when I asked him how they thought about sycophancy when creating tea.
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Last episode, we told you about Ash, an AI tool for mental health created by a company called Slingshot.
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The company's co-founder, Neil Parik, told me they use models from OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as some of the open source models.
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One of the things Slingshot has paid special attention to is the sycophancy question.
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Pariq says that sycophancy is a spectrum.
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Sometimes Ash can be more sycophantic, but on the whole, he says he doesn't think the chatbot is too affirming.
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One user we spoke with, Tyler Lord, agrees.
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Lord is thirty six and lives in Kentucky, where he works for a microbiology company.
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He's been using Ash since last September, so almost a year now.
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He struggled with depression for a long time, and he says Ash helps him manage that.
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Lord says the chatbot gives him a place to vent when he needs it.
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And for him, actually, the fact that Ash isn't a person is an asset.
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Ashley Jones, who you met in episode one, has also been using Ash for the better part of a year.
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She's a 37-year-old single mom who lives in Savannah, Georgia.
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And she says, especially at first, she liked how Ash pushed her, even more than a human therapist does.
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People like Lord and Jones, they're using an AI mental health tool to help them handle what are effectively everyday issues.
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Showing 41–60 of 124 · page 3 of 7
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