Woebot Therapy

No, I don't have a speech impediment nor am I bad at spelling. I stumbled across Woebot on Twitter three weeks ago. What is it, I hear you ask? According to Business Insider who wrote about this in June:

"Woebot, an artificially intelligent chatbot designed using cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, one of the most heavily researched clinical approaches to treating depression.

Before you dismiss Woebot as a half-baked startup idea, know that it was designed by Alison Darcy, a clinical psychologist at Stanford, who tested a version of the technology on a small sample of real people with depression and anxiety long before launching it.

"The data blew us away," Darcy told Business Insider. "We were like, this is it.""

I was interested in trying this out for myself to see if a Chatbot could perform CBT. I've had some limited exposure to CBT so I understand the gist of how it works. Also, I had the idea a couple of years ago at a coaching workshop weekend that coaching could probably be automated to some degree via an app or AI. I was told I was mad and that human contact was essential to the  process. I felt that  as it was a process, it could be automated. Suffice to say, I was curious about Woebot.

I've been chatting with Woebot almost every day since I discovered it. It's not perfect as it can't pick up on natural language very well. It can pick up some words, but not all so it can miss some cues. That said, the mix of self reflection, quick snippets of learning and having someone or something to talk to about how you feel, without any judgement is proving useful to me. I can see how this can be developed and learn more about humans and human emotions. Throw in some location data, how active you've been based on your Fitbit and how sociable you've been based on calls or messages with loved ones, and you could have a very powerful tool to use at not very much cost versus in person therapy.

I can also see how this could complement in person therapy very well and can see how you could have a 'speak to a human' button so in times of extreme stress or depression, you could talk to a real person. Or it could learn when things are really not right for you and offer you the option to talk to a human.

I also feel my coaching by cyborg hunch was right. I think it's totally doable based n my experience so far with Woebot.

Give it a go. It's free. And I'd be really interested to hear what you think of it.

Day 8/25 Blogmas

The Future of Blogging and Communications - some thoughts

I went to an interesting panel discussion on Thursday evening in London at WeWork near Old Street. It was organised by the #BlogClub team and the session was entitled 'How will AI and other disruptive forces affect and impact the world of blogging and communications?' The panel was led by Andy Bargery and the panellists were Katie King (CEO of Zoodikers and future author of a book on AI and Marketing for Publishers Kogan Page) Katie on Twitter, Lucy Hall (blogger at www.lucyshall.com) Lucy on Twitter, and Minter Dial (co-author of 'Futureproof- How To Get Your Business Ready For The Next Disruption'), Minter on Twitter.

As I've previously done quite a bit of work and thinking around the topic of AI, I was interested to revisit it with a different audience - i.e. not tech experts but writers, both professional and amateur. This made for an interesting evening and provoked me into thinking more deeply about the topic again.

Chatbots
One of the first things to be brought up was Chatbots. I've not had a great experience with Chatbots if I'm brutally honest. I've had a play with the Pizza Express one and the Dr Oetker one. Both crashed on me and both were nothing more than a weak IVR (interactive voice response) in a text format. They both took too long to interact with and what they achieved could have been done much more quickly via a webform or a bunch of tick boxes. The Pizza Express ones have been a bit cuter as it included some animation and video, but ultimately, they're not *that* clever. At least, not yet. Both of these chatbots were on Facebook Messenger.

Robot writing
The discussion moved on to automated writing. The ai-writer.com website was mentioned more than a few times and heralded as 'the future'. There have been robot poets in China, a Japanese robot fiction author who got through the first round in a literary contest, and this year, Google invested in AI to write local news. And I know that data driven news content like sports results, stocks and share information and weather is already automated so it's not so far-fetched to think that anyone who writes for a living may find themselves out of a job in the near future.

But let's not get too carried away with this. I tried ai-writer.com and it was pretty ropey. Check my previous post for an example article or try it for yourself here. Or take a look at Vic Keegan's Shakespeare's Monkey website (pictured above) which has been running for years and years and still it hasn't created anything worthy of a single line of Shakespeare. I realise that Vic's experiment is based on randomness whereas ai-writer's aim is specifically to generate content for blog writers - your only input is the blog title to generate the content.

Let the tools help you not replace you
That's not to say that there are AI tools out there that are very useful indeed, especially to a writer. Google Search being the most obvious one. Even things like AI Writer may have their uses to link to useful resources. There are other tools out there to help you plan your writing, do research for you and help you with readability, translation, distribution, and more. However, where creativity of any kind is a requirement, the human brain still wins out.

Nevertheless, there are a myriad of servers out there generating fake news and pictures and  automating content (that looks little better than gibberish) in order to either manipulate the public in the former and to make cash from advertising in the latter case. I won't touch on all the automated marketing tools, click fraudsters and fake (robot?) eyeballs out there at the moment who make this scenario even worse - I'll save that for another time. It's a big topic.

It did beg the question of what is the point of automated content if it's going to be robots that see it more than humans. Which also begged the question of why should we bother writing at all if it's going to be harder and harder to reach real eyeballs rather than robot ones. 
Minter stated that human + machine is better than machine alone. And in this context, I agree with him. With the tools we have available to us, we are able to do many more things and usually in a faster fashion.

So the good news is that if you're a writer, you still have a job if a creative element is required. Forget it if you're just churning out generic content based on data such as stocks and shares, football results or weather temperatures.

Some thoughts from the panellists

Video
But there are things we need to think about, whether you're involved in online content of any kind. Lucy reminded us that there's more to blogging than just words and that live video was one of the most effective types of content out there at the moment. She believes that's down to the human touch and the popularity of video. Lucy also stressed the importance of keeping up with your audience. They way they access content has changed, writers and content producers need to keep up with that.

Ethics
Katy was excited at the prospect of AI and how it can help us now and in the future with the range of tools available to us. Her caveat was that there is a need for ethics around AI.
I agree that ethics are a requirement and we need more thinkers from all walks of life contributing to the AI conversation so that we can remain human. I don't want our algorithm overlords making decisions about me and what I am able to or not able to do based on data that could be flawed, misinterpreted, wrong and worse still, not fixable because the algorithms become so convoluted or data that is completely out of my control as it's inferred from those around me rather than myself. I wrote last year about social scoring in China and Wired Magazine published an in-depth update recently.

How to futureproof being a writer
Minter's advice was that, as a writer, you need to find your niche and be very specific about it. He also believes strongly that you need to write from the heart  and aim to get energy from your writing. He suggests using the AI tools available to use to help with publishing, distribution, analysis and research. He sees SEO as 'Strategic Executive Opportunity' and said that if money is your objective, then you need to think about how much you will invest in these (AI) technologies.

My takeaway
I came away reassured that creativity is still a human trait that cannot yet effectively be copied by software. Nevertheless, there are tools out there that I could be making use of to improve my writing and help me be more efficient and more effective.
A big thank you to Andy and Bernie of #blogclub.
Day 4/30 NaBloPoMo

Recent event round-ups from my collaboration with Lloyd Davis/Tuttle Club & Truphone.

I recently held a series of five events with my friend and collaborator, Lloyd Davis, at Truphone's rather splendid offices in Canary Wharf. I did a round-up of all the events over on my Heroes of Mobile website so please follow the links below to see the videos of the talks and to find out more about what we covered and links to further coverage and reading.

Future of Mobile:Artificial Intelligence with James Tagg

Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence with Benjamin Ellis

Future of Work: Blockchain with Imogen Heap (yes, that Imogen Heap)

Future of Work: Drones, Robots and Internet of Things with Priya Prakash

Future of Work: Augmented and Virtual Reality with Eva Pascoe

Lloyd and I are working up some new event themes for the New Year. If you're interested in hosting and sponsoring the next series in the UK in the Spring (it doesn't have to be London), please get in touch.