“We had to develop something that really is trained in the broad repertoire that a real therapist would be, which is a lot of different content areas. Thinking about all of the common mental health problems that folks might manifest and be ready to treat those,” Jacobson said. “That is why it took so long. There are a lot of things people experience.”

The team first trained Therabot on data derived from online peer support forums, such as cancer support pages. But Therabot initially…