I Tried the Woebot AI Therapy App to See if It Would Help My Anxiety and OCD

If you haven’t heard of AI-based chatting technology by now, it’s possible you’ve been living under a rock: There has been a lot of discussion about the simultaneously exciting and terrifying power that apps like ChatGPT have to change the landscape of, well, pretty much everything we do online, from researching and writing term papers to creating savvy business presentations to generating outlandish plotlines for fictional stories.

But can AI cross over into the mental health arena, too? Can an AI-based app provide meaningful support if you’re coping with symptoms of anxiety or depression, struggling with negative thoughts, fighting feelings of stress or loneliness, or having difficulty navigating relationships?

Woebot Health wants you to think so, which is why it’s created the cute little cartoon robot avatar called “Woebot.” Combining psychology research with AI technology, Woebot “talks” to you through a messaging app about what you’re experiencing, then uses proven therapeutic strategies based in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to engage, educate, and assist you with whatever issues you share with your new robot friend. 

As someone who has been diagnosed with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), I was curious to see if Woebot could help me push through some of the negative thought patterns and anxious feelings I often have on a daily basis. While I have a great therapist, the work that gets done in-office is long-range; I wondered if Woebot could assist with in-the-moment stressors, and remind me how to actually use all the coping mechanisms I’ve learned over my years in therapy. To find out, I chatted with Woebot several times per week for 30 days. 

Turns out, although some aspects of the app were very helpful and engaging in the moment, I ultimately didn’t feel like the experience of using Woebot was useful in my everyday life—so it’s fair to say I’ll be sticking with a human therapist for now. Here’s how using Woebot went for me.

How I Signed Up for Woebot

I was pleasantly surprised that the full app was free and available for both iOS and Android users, making it accessible to literally anyone with a smartphone. (However, I did note in the FAQs that it may not always be free in order to establish “a sustainable business,” which I thought was an interesting thing to admit.) Woebot Health also says it designed the app for young adults, but everyone from teens to older adults can use it. 

Wait times to see a mental health professional are long, Woebot Health informs us, but the Woebot app is ready to assist as soon as it’s downloaded—and admittedly, this is true. As soon as I downloaded it, I was able to jump right into the conversation.

Woebot is what’s called an “automated conversational agent” or “chatbot.” When I opened the app, I could start a conversation with Woebot about my day or go straight to the topics section and complete one of its built-in educational modules. 

How Woebot Works

The therapeutic approach used by Woebot is primarily cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), an evidence-based approach to treating mental health issues that includes recognizing problematic thinking patterns and changing the unhelpful behavioral responses that often follow. For example, you might notice that you get very anxious and scared when you feel like someone is criticizing you; CBT would theoretically help you recognize that trigger and learn to react to that kind of situation in a healthier and more supportive way.

If I chose to use one of its modules, I could choose among broad categories like relationships, self-care and self-image, stress and change, and achieving goals. Each category has about 10 modules requiring around five minutes of conversation with Woebot. A typical module might start out with Woebot asking me a question or talking about a challenging situation, and then coaching me through the process of identifying problematic thought patterns or behaviors, relating hypothetical scenarios to my real-life experiences, or making plans for coping with similar challenges in the future.

For example, one module I liked was about the difference between anxiety and worry; Woebot said something like “I went on a trip recently and was worried about getting to the airport on time” and then, over the course of a few minutes, introduced the concept of anxiety versus worry, quizzed me on the difference, and asked me to write my own responses to some questions.

And although I basically already knew the difference, it was good to get a reminder (and any user who was learning this for the first time would have probably benefited from Woebot’s clear and concise explanation).

I liked that Woebot gave me a lot of agency; it always asked me if I wanted to chat about specific topics, giving me scripted responses to choose from, like “Sure,” “Not now,” or “Maybe later.” I also liked that I could set my own pace—I could check in as often as I wanted and spend as much time as I felt like in the app. About every five minutes (or in between topics of conversation), Woebot would ask me if I wanted to keep going, try something else, or be done for the time being. 

Did It Help Me?

Personally, I found the modules to be more helpful than the daily check-ins.

Occasionally, I was allowed to express myself in my own words, but usually I had to talk to Woebot by choosing from a set of expressions, questions, or comments. When those didn’t fit with what I wanted to say, I just had to pick the best one—and I would pretty much immediately feel checked out of the conversation, like I wasn’t really engaging with the app. 

Woebot Health wants to present its app as equally as helpful as therapy, but it often can’t compare. Once, I opened up the app to check in with Woebot after having a frustrating morning with my son, and there was simply no way to express that to Woebot accurately, or truly hone in on the complex emotions I was having. I ended up closing the app and feeling annoyed that Woebot couldn’t help me process those emotions the way I thought it could. As someone who’s been through years of therapy, there is a huge difference in being able to sit down with a person and say, “I’ve had a really tough day and I don’t even know where to start,” and opening up an app to choose a pre-selected statement like “I’m feeling low.” 

Even when things got stressful in my real life, Woebot wasn’t a coping strategy I considered using.

I checked in more out of obligation, and often found that even the modules—which were more useful for me than the spontaneous chats—only scratched the surface of what they were trying to address. I can’t say I learned anything new; I reviewed concepts I’ve already learned about in therapy, and that was sometimes helpful, but nothing in the app was useful enough to keep me coming back for more.

Pros and Cons

Woebot was a convenient, bite-sized way to grow my own therapy skills at home, offering the chance to see how my brain processes challenging emotions and improve my responses to those emotions. But for people like me, who have already done a lot of that work in traditional therapy, Woebot felt superficial and underwhelming (and, at times, even frustrating to rely on).

Final Thoughts

If you’ve never done any kind of therapy and are struggling with unhealthy or unproductive thought patterns or behaviors to things like stress, anxiety, or depression, Woebot is a good beginner’s training tool. I could set my own learning pace, engage with Woebot however I wanted, and trust that the app was tracking my progress over time and using my responses to get to know me—and my issues—a little bit better. 

I was often confined to chatting via scripted comments or questions, which made me feel more like an observer in the conversation than an active participant. I also would have loved Woebot to be scaled differently for people with different levels of therapeutic know-how; the app never gave me anything but beginner-level information about thought patterns and behaviors, maintaining a superficial approach that simply wasn’t beneficial to me, a therapy veteran. 

I’m not sure the modules alone are worth downloading Woebot for, though, since I never felt inspired to open the app and complete a module just for fun. 

I also think Woebot Health oversells the benefit of its app. It says you’ll form a relationship with Woebot in a matter of days that’s just as good as the bond between a human therapist and their patient, but I have a hard time seeing how that’s possible when Woebot is dominating much of the conversation, either through instruction or scripted responses to its comments and questions. 

I might recommend Woebot to someone with limited mental health concerns (like feeling mildly anxious, stuck, or depressed) who has little to no existing knowledge of therapeutic approaches, but it’s probably not worth the download if you have ever been or currently go to traditional therapy.