The mental health AI chatbot made for real life | Alison Darcy (Kelly Corrigan takeover)
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm Kelly Corrigan. I'm a writer. I'm a podcaster. I'm a TED Talker. And I am taking over for Elise Hu this week for a special series on AI and family life. A guest curated a session about this topic at TED 2025. And I'm here now to share these very special talks with you, along with behind-the-scenes recordings and personal insights that shed light on the process of bringing them to life. So I was listening to another podcast and I heard this fabulous woman named Dr. Alison Darcy. And I admit I was swayed by her charming Irish accent. But also she has a very light touch in a very heavy world, which is creating AI products.
therapy for people who probably wouldn't do therapy at all, anywhere, anytime, but nonetheless need support. And so I wanted to have Allison share everything that her company, which is called WOEBOT, W-O-E-B-O-T, has learned by trying to be in this very soft, intimate place with people when they're struggling. You know, when I was starting to learn about Wobot and Allison and the work that they'd been doing, my initial reaction was negative. I was like, oh my God, this is the last thing people need. People need people. This is like, I'm on team human. I want everybody to be connecting with each other way more eyeball to eyeball, heart to heart. I wanted Allison to go first because I thought that...
As my initial reaction to the whole idea of AI and parenting was kind of like, sure, like they can sort through your schedule stuff, like they can do logistics, but they're not going to get involved in the deeper interactions that help kids come into themselves as adults. Like that's just territory that will never be touched. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh no, of course that will be touched. Of course there are cases where AI will be better than some parents at some conversations. And so I turned to Alison to say, tell me everything about the 1.5 million people who have used Wobot And help me understand how that might end up looking in the context specifically of family life. To disavow the audience of this separation that they might have in their mind as I did.
That there's sort of a logistics level that AI could play at. And then there's this very intimate emotional level that AI will never touch. I had to show them that AI was already in the intimate space. in very meaningful ways. And so to start us off this week, here is my conversation with Dr. Alison Darcy about the ways that AI might participate in the most intimate consequential conversations we ever have. Welcome. Hi, thank you. So will you describe for us the average Wobot interaction?
Sure. Well, first of all, I suppose it's important to say that we built Wobot to meet an unmet need. In 2017, depression was already the leading cause of disability worldwide. And I'm team human, too, and I also really believe in what human therapists do. But, you know, it doesn't matter how good a therapist is. You could be the best therapist in the world, but unless you're with your patient at 2 a.m. when they are having a panic attack, you can't help them in that moment. And, you know, therapy doesn't happen in a vacuum. We all have real lives. And so I was a clinical research psychologist making some of the world's most sophisticated psychotherapeutic treatments. But I was always haunted by this idea that it doesn't really matter how sophisticated the treatments are that we make if people can't access them.
Yeah. And so access has to be part of the design. And approachability has to be part of the design, because ... what do you do at that 2 a.m. moment? And you can't think straight, you know, and you can't remember the thing that your therapist told you you should do in this moment. And so that, for me, is why we built Wobot, to meet people where they're at in those moments when it's actually hardest to reach out to another person. And how long do they stay on with you? So it's their brief, very brief encounters, six and a half minutes is the average length of time.
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