WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: ‘The Woebot will see you now’ — the rise of chatbot therapy.

My therapist wanted to explain a few things during our first online session:

“I’m going to check in with you at random times. If  you can’t respond straight away, don’t sweat it. Just come back to me when  you’re ready. I’ll check in daily.”

“Daily?” I asked.

“Yup! It shouldn’t take longer than a couple minutes. Can you handle that?

“Yes, I can,” I answered.

There was a little more back-and-forth, all via Messenger, then this statement from my therapist:

“This might surprise you, but . . . I am a robot.”

It wasn’t a surprise, of course. I’d downloaded “Woebot,” a chatbot recently created by researchers, and it was trying to establish our therapeutic relationship.

The article ends with a reference to the mother of them all – Eliza; I’m old enough to have had extended conversations with “her” back in the late 1970s. I don’t think the Woebot is ready to pass the Turing Test yet, but it sounds like psychological chat apps have made a fair amount of progress since.