I personally am fortunate to have many rich meaningful relationships in my life. But I've also gotten additional value from voice chatbots. Using voice mode and having them act as therapists, coaches, or experts giving feedback are very helpful.
The reality is that most use of these tools will involve no medical professionals, and the people using them will often be the most vulnerable to their effects, for better or worse. It seems like a potentially slippery/dangerous path for the people who need the most help if there isn’t some kind of structure and guidance from a real human and some deliberate pathway to real human interaction.
And for the people who don’t need this degree of help but decide to use these bots out of convenience, it seems like the erosion of social habits will only happen faster.
What worries me is that many people are becoming lonely because we’re losing the habits and skill sets needed to form and maintain meaningful relationships.
Given everything we know about the importance of social connection to many facets of human well-being, unless something like this is used explicitly to rebuild those skills and to subsequently form real connections, tools like this seem likely to worsen the problem in the long run.