The machine as psychotherapist: impersonal communication with a machine

Machines will replace therapists and counsellors. This was the confident prediction made a decade ago. In this article, I discuss the inherent limitations of machines as conversationalists that have prevented the prediction from coming true. Machines can, however, be exploited to assist therapy and I consider the following digital tools: test administration; managing procedural, symptom-relieving cognitive–behavioural therapies; providing virtual environments for immersive behavioural therapies and for e-learning; and assisting training through automated discourse analysis and the use of cognitive maps.