How Personalized “Podcasts” Boost Engagement in Therapy

This may sound familiar: You finish a therapy session with a fresh perspective, feeling empowered to change how you approach life or react to situations. But soon after, that feeling fades, you forget to put your therapy breakthrough into practice, and you fall into old patterns instead. It’s a common experience that therapists try to address by giving their clients tools to utilize between therapy sessions—think worksheets, reading, and journal prompts. Those tools can help keep clients engaged in their therapy progress, but they require them to remember to use the tools and put in the work (which, understandably, doesn’t always happen).

Personalized Podcasts Help You Stay On Track

The Talkspace team wanted to create an easier way for our members to make progress on their mental health goals between sessions, so they created an AI-powered, human-approved “podcast” feature called Talkcast. A Talkcast is a brief (less than ten minutes long)  HIPAA-compliant audio discussion that reinforces therapeutic concepts from the client’s therapy sessions, in the style of a podcast episode that the client can listen to any time, or many times, between sessions. You can listen to a Talkcast at the gym, in the car, or anywhere and any time that works for you. 

Talkcast scripts usually summarize and expand on topics you covered in your therapy session. Your therapist will review and modify each podcast script before you receive the audio, to make sure it’s appropriate and helpful. Your therapist will get your permission before creating a Talkcast for you, and you can always choose whether or not to listen to one. Because Talkcast is so easy to work into daily life, it feels less like homework than some between-session exercises might.

Talkcasts Are Linked to Greater Engagement in Therapy

The Talkspace research team wanted to understand whether this new personalized podcast feature was having the impact we’d hoped, so they analyzed data from the first five months after launch. In those first five months therapists generated 28,165 Talkcasts, with nearly half of providers generating at least one Talkcast. Providers’ ongoing quality ratings of Talkcasts were nearly all positive: 92% of the sent and rated Talkcasts were rated as “helpful.” On the member side, 76% of those who opened and rated a Talkcast said that it was “helpful.” 

But the researchers were really excited to discover indications that listening to Talkcasts between sessions leads people to stay more actively engaged in therapy. They found that people who listened to Talkcasts were more likely to communicate with their therapists and schedule another session than people who did not. 

This early data suggests that Talkcast is a successful tool for helping people feel supported between therapy sessions, and may make them more likely to stick with therapy. AI will never replace human therapists, but when this technology can be used to support the therapeutic process and strengthen the connection between our members and their providers, everybody wins. Read more about the Talkcast data analysis in the download below.