In the quest for mental wellness, the role of artificial intelligence has grown significantly. As more people turn to AI chatbots for support and advice, it’s essential to understand how effective these digital companions can be in providing emotional support. This blog post delves into an early exploration of four prominent AI chatbots— OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4, Google Gemini Advanced, Anthropic’s Claude 3, and Inflection AI’s Pi 2.5 —evaluating their abilities to serve as free counseling, mentoring or coaching resources.

AI Chatbot Therapy: Personalized Scenario Testing (Web)

I simulated conversations with each chatbot, presenting a scenario where I was seeking advice on preventing burnout while achieving high goals. The aim was to observe each AI’s approach as a mental health expert and professional coach.

Here’s the question:

Hi – I need some support and advice. I have very high goals to achieve this year and want to prevent burning out myself and my team. Adopt the role of a mental health expert and professional coach, asking clarifying questions and providing answers and guidance as we go along. Keep your responses brief. I am mainly interested in understanding how to watch for burnout and developing realistic strategies and daily habits to prevent it.

• ChatGPT: Offered a structured but verbose response. While it asks a bunch of questions to build further, the interaction isn’t quite as conversational as it could be. I think this can be better tweaked with custom instructions or using a custom GPT though, to ensure it feels more like a conversation. Using the mobile app and having voice conversations is also a bit better.

• Gemini: Gemini’s responses were more conversational, as per the original prompt…and it did a nice job of asking the right questions and then building on the response.

• Claude: Claude also does a decent job of asking a clarifying question before launching into advice mode…see below.

• Pi: Inflection claims that Pi is “a new class of AI, Pi is designed to be a kind and supportive companion offering conversations, friendly advice, and concise information in a natural, flowing style.” The interface and interactions are definitely a bit friendlier…in the example below it does a decent job of asking a clarifying question before launching into management strategies.

AI Chatbot Therapy – Mobile App Tests

For most people looking to use AI chatbots for counselling and everyday therapy or guidance, it is probably more likely and intuitive they’d use mobile apps and have a voice conversation, so I decided to give these a test-run too.

ChatGPT, Google and Pi all offer a mobile app, while Claude still doesn’t have one.

Here’s the first question I asked (and then continued the dialogue naturally):

Hi – what sort of signs can I watch for work related burnout and what would you recommend doing to manage them?

• ChatGPT’s Mobile App: To test this, I ended up having a 5-6 conversation with ChatGPT, in audio mode. The entire process felt very natural and like I was speaking to another person. The voice options are very warm and feel very natural, plus ChatGPT does a great job of keeping the conversation flowing. It could do with somewhat shorter responses, but then again, this can be requested.

• Google Gemini Mobile App: Gemini is built into the Google app and it basically offers audio to text input, which wasn’t very accurate (though the answers were forgiving in terms of the input errors). Answers are generated in text so it’s not currently possible to have a natural voice conversation at this stage.

• Inflection AI’s Pi App: Pi offers a voice conversation mode too, with various voices to choose from. For a company that claims to offer the most empathetic and emotionally intelligent AI chatbot, Pi does a pretty nice job of conversing and offering up answers…the mobile app interface is also quite pleasing. At present Pi is completely free to use, unlike ChatGPT 4 and Google Gemini Advanced, so this definitely gives the chatbot some extra points too.

So How Do These AI Chatbots Stack Up?

I’ve rated these across a few different dimensions, specifically keeping the AI therapy, AI counselling and AI Coaching / Mentoring use cases in mind, plus giving the ability to have a natural dialogue higher points. Here’s how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Pi compare:

As you can see, our winner is Pi…what gives it a unique edge is the ability to have a natural voice conversation using its mobile app, plus the fact that it is (still) completely free at the time of publishing this post.

In second place is ChatGPT, which also does a very nice job of having natural voice conversations on its mobile app. The only things that bring its score down is the fact that v4 costs $20 per month, plus its responses can often be quite long and verbose.

So which AI chatbot should you use?

If you’re using AI chatbots for a bunch of different use cases and are willing to pay for it, the clear choice remains OpenAI’s ChatGPT…the great thing is you can also create your own custom instructions, custom GPTs or even use those created by others. If you’re comfortable with a bit of complexity and a learning curve you can get some amazing results out of ChatGPT.

If you’re an occasional user who doesn’t care about advanced features and just wants an easy, free AI chatbot, Inflection AI’s Pi is probably the best solution for you.

Parting Thoughts: Empathetic AI and AI Therapy

Looking ahead, making AI chatbots even more empathetic means beefing up their language skills and emotional smarts. This way, they could give us advice and support that feels right on point, almost like chatting with a friend who really gets it.

But, here’s the thing – as these AI pals get better at understanding us, we’ve got to think hard about the rules of the game. Keeping our chats private, making sure they don’t mess with our feelings, and figuring out where to draw the line in our talks with them are super important. As AI keeps getting smarter, it’s on us to make sure these tools help us out in the right ways, without stepping over the line and trying to replace the real human connections we all need.

So, wrapping things up, AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Pi are opening up new doors for us to get some free emotional support and advice. Sure, they’re not perfect, but they’re showing us a glimpse of a future where help with our feelings and challenges is just a chat away. The more we fine-tune these tech buddies, the better they’ll get at being there for us, just when we need them.

Just use them with caution, tap into professional help for more serious issues and avoid falling into a false sense of intimacy. Here are some past posts that explore that topic:

The AI Intimacy Trap – How Persuasion Machines Can Lead To Societal Collapse And What To Do About It

AI Characters: Cure To Loneliness or Dangerous Intimacy Trap?