It might seem silly, but I'm looking forward to the first AI talk therapist. Most of the benefit of therapy is the talking, so it's not as crazy as it sounds.
Not crazy at all. At least some therapies provide benefits even with simple non-AI processes: "A meta-analyses of 15 studies, published in this month’s volume of Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, found no significant difference in the treatment outcomes for patients who saw a therapist and those who followed a self-help book or online program."[0]
[0] https://qz.com/1057345/researchers-say-you-might-as-well-be-...
The VC world is interested in “traction” and not novel tech which means we have to divert effort into growing customers for our mental health practice management system to get “traction” before we can spend any notable time building AI therapists. As much as VCs talk about “looking for innovation” they really aren’t. They are just looking at current growth/revenue. The days of building something amazing and monetizing later seem to be over for all except for founders with marquee names.
We could launch AI therapists within a year, but in the meantime, I have to pay my team. So we are forced to subsidize moonshot R&D with our existing sales — but that is hard to do since existing sales have to finance customer acquisition. Finding an additional $500k per year to make AI therapy viable is impossible for us.
We are in a catch 22. The first question from nearly every investor’s mouth: “how many paid users do you have?” Not, what technology do you have or can develop that is truly disruptive. We could start preparing AI therapy tomorrow for a Summer 2018 launch if we could afford it. But if we diverted resources to that, we’d be out of business long before launch. Clinically effective AI therapy isn’t a weekend side project.
The biggest challenge I saw was gaining the trust of sufficient therapists and patients and then an IRB. If you've solved those problems and can actually demonstrate data collection and a computational workflow with any evidence of results whatsoever, I suspect money would not be a problem.
https://www.amazon.com/Asimov-Eliza/dp/B0184NR4P8
Not sure what their stance on privacy is though.