Mental Health Company Headspace Launches Empathetic AI Companion
Conversational AI tool ‘Ebb’ supports people through the ebbs and flows of life by helping them process their thoughts and emotions and find relevant meditation, mindfulness, and mental health content from the Headspace app
Today Headspace, the world’s leading comprehensive mental health platform, introduced Ebb, an empathetic AI companion integrated into its app to help people navigate life’s ups and downs. Ebb provides instant, personalized support designed to guide Headspace members through self-reflection and emotional processing.
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“Long term, we envision Ebb becoming a nimble, knowledgeable mental health companion that learns from member behavior, adapts to changing needs, and complements the care provided by our clinicians and mental health coaches – as well as helps to triage and escort a member to these providers.”
Built by a team of clinical psychologists and data scientists, Ebb is a conversational AI tool trained in motivational interviewing, an evidence-based methodology that can help people make positive behavioral changes. With the guidance of Ebb, Headspace members can engage in deeper self-reflection, process thoughts and emotions, and receive personalized content recommendations from the vast Headspace library of thousands of meditations, mindfulness exercises, and mental health content. By serving up personalized content for the member’s current emotional state, Ebb allows members to seamlessly transition from reflection into a supportive, relevant exercise.
“It can feel daunting to process emotions with friends and family for fear of being judged or misunderstood. We designed Ebb to be an empathetic, non-judgmental listening ear for people through a variety of life circumstances,” said Jenna Glover, Ph.D., Chief Clinical Officer at Headspace. “Long term, we envision Ebb becoming a nimble, knowledgeable mental health companion that learns from member behavior, adapts to changing needs, and complements the care provided by our clinicians and mental health coaches – as well as helps to triage and escort a member to these providers.”
Over the past decade, Headspace has used AI in its platform to reduce the administrative load on its care providers, identify safety risk in member chat conversations, and serve up relevant mental health and mindfulness content to its members. Its new app feature, Ebb, was trained using a combination of large language models, as well as proprietary in-house datasets, which include curated interactions that reflect a broad range of emotions and life experiences.
Designed with safety and privacy in mind, Ebb does not give mental health advice, guidance, or diagnoses, but rather prompts people to pause from their day to reflect on their thoughts and feelings. Research has found various benefits for processing emotions and self-reflection, including improvements on well-being, working memory, stress, and resilience.
“Headspace has long leveraged technology to scale access to a wide variety of mental health and wellness tools and services. Generative AI and machine learning now offers us the ability to turbo-charge these efforts, delivering a level of empathetic sub-clinical engagement not previously available,” said Leslie Witt, Chief Product and Design Officer at Headspace. “While our use of AI is not meant to replace the support licensed mental health professionals provide, we know it can help individuals reflect, unpack challenging emotions, and establish mindful habits.”
Headspace has a variety of mental health and wellbeing tools available in its consumer app downloaded by over 100 million people globally. Earlier this year, the company added the availability of mental health coaching for purchase directly by consumers after providing that service for the past decade to its enterprise and health plan customers. Since then, it has added more meditation and mental health content to its in-app library to support members through key life moments, like navigating a fertility journey and coping with election stress. In the coming months, the company plans to launch therapy services for consumers and will accept a variety of insurance plans.
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