The AI app Soula seeks to improve healthcare access for pregnant women

How to design an empathetic AI chatbot

Soula enlisted real-life doulas to help train its chatbot and strike the right tone.

“We can’t create it to be as personable as talking to a real-life person, but we can try to create that as much as possible,” said Lexi Pacheco, a doula from Arizona who worked to help refine the dialogue in Soula’s chatbot Dua. For $22 per hour, she helped improve the chatbot by using it “hand-in-hand” during her pregnancies, adding in her expertise.

While asking questions on Google could yield more informational responses, Pacheco said mothers would want something that provided “more of that reassurance that Google wouldn’t.”

For Armani Grant, a Soula user who became pregnant at 18, Google felt overwhelming. The chatbot allowed her to ask questions that she wouldn’t feel comfortable asking her mother.

Pacheco said many women she’s worked with reported similar experiences.

“They might even feel incompetent to ask the question, which no woman should ever feel, but with my history of working with people, they definitely tend to revert to: I’m sorry, I’m asking this question for some reason, and that might just be because of the societal pressure that more medicalized doctors have put on people that they don’t give the time and day to us,” Pacheco said.

The app isn’t meant to completely replace a doula. Moreover, retention rates of AI healthcare chatbots can be low, said Johannes Eichstaedt, a computational social scientist and assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University. The high dropout rates for healthcare apps are “an elephant in the room,” he said.

At the same time, Pacheco said AI bots can help “calm nerves” and fill the gaps when patients feel they are “bothering” their healthcare providers.

“AI isn’t like a healthcare provider to give you guidance, but it’s supposed to be there to give you a little bit more comfort,” Pacheco said.