Millions of data points from hundreds of thousands of people being treated for mental health maladies allowed a local company to create a chatbot for its website that helps steer clients to the treatment they need.
TAO Connect, an online health company based in St. Petersburg, released its new chatbot in August and it has shown great success, said Sherry Benton, Ph.D., the company’s founder and chief science officer.
“This was always on our radar for where we wanted to go to individualize and customize treatment based on different data,” she said. “To do AI (artificial intelligence), you have to have a pretty massive set of data, so everything we built so far was so we could get hundreds of thousands of users and millions of points of data so we could individualize and customize. Now we are there.”
The chatbot processes user information, how they respond and what seems to move their progress in the right direction, before making recommendations on what comes next.
“It’s like when Netflix or Amazon might make recommendations on what shows to watch. This recommends activities, mindfulness exercises, different kinds of educational sessions. The chatbot kind of walks you through it.”
Clients are very excited about how well it works, Benton said. “It has actually been going incredibly well” for serving people seeking counseling for everything from serious depression to trying to stop procrastinating.
TAO Connect is a service used most often in addition to a client’s therapist to help them get through their mental health issue. Clients can also pop in for what Benton calls “grab-and-go” sessions.
Sales for TAO Connect in the third quarter of this year were double what they were a year ago, Benton said.
