I read something about this on Reddit's page for psychotherapists not too long ago. There (I didn't read the article here) there was talk about using a chatbot app as an adjunct to psychotherapy - clients could use the bot to explore an issue (the idea being that actually sitting down and writing down an answer to the bot's "tell me more about that" could clarify the issue for the client). Kind of like interactive journaling.

There was also some talk about the bot taking these conversations, crunching them down, and spitting some sort of information (not clear what kind - maybe it was a summary or word analysis program a la Pennebaker) out for the therapist to review.

I think, as an adjunct to therapy/interactive journaling, it's an interesting idea. I'm not sure it's much more than an interesting idea...I mean, "talk to this bot" is a pretty hard sell to someone in crisis. I'd probably have felt insulted.

Oh, the reddit discussion had a link to try out a beta version of the bot. I "talked" to it for a while. It was interesting, but I'd probably have been left unsatisfied had I tried to actually solve some problem with the bot.