How BetterHelp, Talkspace, Grow Therapy, and SonderMind Use AI

The short answer: all four use AI, mostly behind the scenes

If you use BetterHelp, Talkspace, Grow Therapy, or SonderMind, AI is almost certainly touching your care somewhere. None of these platforms has replaced its therapists with chatbots. All of them employ licensed clinicians, and the sessions are delivered by humans. What the AI does is surround the session: it matches you with a therapist, drafts the clinical note afterward, summarizes your progress before the next appointment, and in some cases talks to you between sessions through journaling prompts, reflections, or app-based check-ins.

That distinction matters. AI handling paperwork is a different risk category than AI handling your feelings. The first mostly raises privacy and accuracy questions. The second raises safety questions, which is why platforms move much more carefully there and why regulators in states like Illinois have drawn hard lines around AI acting as the therapist.

Below is what each platform has publicly rolled out, based on company announcements, earnings calls, and press coverage through July 2026. Products change fast in this space, so treat this as a snapshot and check your own app's settings and consent screens for the current state.

BetterHelp: AI matching, plus a privacy record worth knowing

BetterHelp's most visible use of AI is matching. When you fill out the intake questionnaire, an algorithm pairs you with a therapist. On a 2023 earnings call, executives at Teladoc Health, BetterHelp's parent company, said the platform uses AI to optimize member-therapist matching across more than 100 criteria and was matching a patient with a provider roughly every 30 seconds. Teladoc has since said it is investing in AI across the business to improve efficiency and engagement, including for BetterHelp.

BetterHelp also carries the industry's most instructive privacy lesson. In March 2023, the Federal Trade Commission charged that BetterHelp had shared consumers' email addresses, IP addresses, and health questionnaire answers with Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest for advertising, despite promising to keep that data private. The FTC finalized its order in July 2023: BetterHelp paid $7.8 million toward partial consumer refunds and is banned from sharing health data for advertising.

The episode predates the current wave of AI features, and the order now restricts what BetterHelp can do with your data. It is still the clearest reminder in this industry that the intake answers you give a therapy platform are sensitive data, and that what a company promises in its privacy policy and what it does are separate questions worth verifying.

Talkspace: smart notes, session prep, and an AI podcast

Talkspace has been the most public about building an AI toolkit for its therapists. Its smart notes feature generates draft summary notes of member sessions for providers to review. On January 15, 2025, the company launched Insights, which synthesizes a client's assessment scores and recent session details into a pre-session primer for the therapist, then generates a post-session update on progress and follow-ups. Talkspace says this work comes out of a dedicated AI Innovation Group and that client data stays inside its encrypted, HIPAA-covered platform.

The client-facing experiments are more unusual. Talkcast, rolled out in 2025, lets a therapist generate a short personalized podcast episode for a client after a session, recapping themes and suggesting things to practice. Speaking at a CNBC event in October 2025, Talkspace CEO Jon Cohen said the podcast feature had driven a 30 percent increase in engagement from a second to a third therapy session.

Talkspace also runs AI on the safety side. Risk algorithms embedded in its platform scan conversations for signs of suicide risk and alert the therapist. Cohen told CNBC that within its New York City teen program, which has served about 40,000 teens, those alerts had contributed to 500 suicide-prevention interventions over two years. Cohen has simultaneously been one of the loudest voices warning against teens using general-purpose chatbots for mental health support, calling the consequences disastrous and urging parents to pay attention. If you are in crisis or thinking about suicide, call or text 988 (US Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), available 24/7.

Grow Therapy: ambient scribes with dual consent

Grow Therapy, a marketplace that connects clients with independent therapists and handles their insurance and admin, launched its first AI clinical tools on February 5, 2025, rolling out to a network of more than 17,000 providers. The tools use ambient listening: software listens to the session and produces a draft clinical note for the therapist plus a plain-language after-visit summary for the client covering what was discussed and what comes next.

The consent design is worth copying industry-wide. Both the client and the provider must agree before the scribe activates, sessions are not stored as recordings, and the transcribed notes are encrypted. Newsweek reported that about half of patients opted in during the first two weeks, and CEO Jake Cooper framed the philosophy plainly: therapy works because it is human-centered, and the clinician stays the quarterback of care.

Grow has kept building on the client side since then, announcing AI-assisted between-session reflections that surface themes from client journaling, and an AI coach chat feature developed and monitored under clinician oversight. Each step moves AI closer to the client, which makes the consent and oversight questions more important, and Grow's public framing has consistently kept the licensed clinician in charge of care.

SonderMind: AI Notes and a growing AI suite

SonderMind, which matches clients to in-network therapists and psychiatric providers, commercially launched its AI Notes tool on September 16, 2025. With patient consent, it transcribes the session and formats the clinical note for the provider to review and submit. The company says the tool cut average note completion time by 80 percent, from about 20 minutes to about four minutes, saving providers up to 90 minutes a day, and that 88 percent of its providers opted in, with more than 100,000 AI-generated notes submitted to insurers by launch.

In October 2025, SonderMind expanded this into a broader AI Suite: session prep and treatment planning support for providers, plus client-side app features like session takeaways, journaling, and goal tracking designed to extend support between weekly appointments.

SonderMind has also been specific about governance in its announcements: HIPAA and ISO 27001 compliance, encryption, features reviewed by an internal AI Governance Council of clinicians and compliance experts, and a stated policy that provider and client data is never sold or used for advertising. Those are company claims rather than independent audits, but they are the right claims to look for, and they give you concrete language to hold the platform to.

What stays human, and what to ask your platform

Across all four platforms, the pattern is consistent: AI drafts, summarizes, matches, and reminds, while licensed humans assess, treat, and carry responsibility for care. That split exists for good reasons. The evidence that the human relationship drives therapy outcomes is among the strongest in the field: a 2018 meta-analysis of 295 studies covering more than 30,000 patients found that the alliance between client and therapist robustly predicts outcome. The World Health Organization has likewise urged caution about deploying large language models in health care faster than they can be tested and governed.

Session transcription deserves your specific attention. When an AI scribe is on, your words are being processed by software, sometimes by third-party subprocessors, to produce the note. Reputable platforms require consent and encrypt the data. You still have the right to understand the pipeline before you agree.

Between-session AI features deserve a second look too. Journaling prompts, reflections, personalized recaps, and coach-style chat all extend the platform's reach into your week, which can genuinely help you practice skills, and also means more of your inner life flows through the company's systems. Treat these features as optional extras you evaluate one at a time rather than defaults you accept in a single tap, and remember that none of them is a crisis tool.

Five questions worth asking any platform: Is anything I say transcribed or processed by AI, and can I opt out without losing service? Is my data used to train AI models? Who besides my therapist can access AI-generated notes or summaries? What happens to transcripts if I delete my account? And does a human review every AI-generated note before it enters my record? A platform that answers these clearly is telling you something good about itself. One that cannot is telling you something too.