New research from Dartmouth College shows that an AI therapeutic chatbot can provide a service that matches the “gold standard” of cognitive therapy. The results of a clinical trial for the first time demonstrate that AI can successfully assist in treating depression, anxiety, and eating disorders.
How does AI therapy work?
The chatbot, known as Therabot, is trained according to proven therapeutic practices and has built-in safety protocols for crisis situations, under the supervision of mental health professionals. Over 8 weeks of testing, users communicated with Therabot for an average of 6 hours, which is roughly equivalent to 8 traditional therapy sessions.
The results are impressive:
- 51% reduction in depression symptoms
- 31% reduction in anxiety symptoms
- Users reported a high level of trust and therapeutic alliance
Users also developed significant attachment to Therabot, regularly engaging and communicating with the chatbot even without prompts.
Check out the video on how AI can detect cancer with 99% accuracy.
How do you think AI could change the way we approach treatment and mental health care?
In Brief: Tech World Highlights
- Musk’s company xAI has begun implementing a memory feature in its Grok AI assistant, after OpenAI did the same last week.
- Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence (SSI) has partnered with Google Cloud to use their TPU chips for research and development purposes.
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed that the company will adopt the open Model Context Protocol developed by Anthropic to enable its models to connect with diverse data sources and applications.
- Canva has introduced Visual Suite 2.0, a set of AI features and a voice-controlled AI creative assistant that generates editable content at the Canva Create 2025 event.
- OpenAI has filed a counter lawsuit against Elon Musk, accusing him of harassment and asking the federal court to prevent him from any further “illegal and unfair actions.”
AI Trending Tools:
- Gemini in Sheets – Allows the use of Google’s Gemini AI directly within Google Sheets.
- Gemini 2.5 Flash – A faster and cheaper version of Google’s AI model for reasoning.
- Kimi-VL – Moonshot’s AI model with 3 billion parameters that competes with models 10 times larger.
