- The Soula app has an AI chatbot, Dua, that aids mothers with postpartum depression support.
- AI chatbots like Dua aim to reduce healthcare burdens and improve mental health access.
- OB/GYN experts said that they welcome innovation in AI to destigmatize questions about pregnancy.
Caring for a month-old newborn and two-year-old son felt overwhelming for LeRonika Francis.
During her first postpartum period, Francis said she experienced a heavy wave of depression while dealing with a baby with colic. She ultimately sought the help of a counselor. It was not until her most recent pregnancy that she also started to use an AI chatbot on the fem-tech app Soula, which she said helped with reducing depressive symptoms and reassuring her about her mental health.
"It tells me: 'Welcome back, LeRonika. Your reactions are natural,'" said Francis, who is based in New Iberia, Louisiana.
The AI chatbot called "Dua" also sent her some videos that she could watch about self-hugging, a practice that could reduce stress levels.
"I feel like Dua is there more than anything. It really showed me: OK, this is what you could do. Make sure you make time for yourself, too, because that's important as well," said Francis.
Soula was co-founded by Natallia Miranchuk and Andrei Kulik, who conceptualized a 24/7 AI doula that could close the gap in mental health support for mothers during pregnancy and postpartum periods. Rather than replacing medical providers, apps such as Soula aim to increase broader access to maternal healthcare. Healthcare providers said that these apps could also help reduce the burden on the healthcare system, where wait times can be long and workers face burnout.
Business Insider spoke with OB/GYN doctors and doulas, who largely welcomed the rise in AI chatbots because they can make information more accessible to patients.
According to data obtained from Sensor Tower, Soula now has more than 35,000 downloads. The startup has fundraised over $750,000 and is backed by investors such as Andrey Mikhaylyuk, the former vice president of product at Flo Health, a period tracking app.
Miranchuk told BI that her experiences as a single mother of two and her work as a former maternity photographer inspired her to develop a supportive app for women. Initially conceptualized as a hub to connect doulas worldwide to those in need, the generative AI boom shifted the startup's focus to integrating a chatbot that could serve more populations.
"Women are shy to ask questions, even in the community, because they have the feeling that maybe 'as a mom, I should have known that, but I don't.' And she doesn't know where to go," Miranchuk said.
The ease of customizing ChatGPT has spurred a wave of new AI-based chatbots like Soula. According to Sensor Tower, the companion apps Character.ai, Talkie, and Paradot have more than 73 million collective downloads, soaring more than 130% between 2023 and 2024. AI therapy apps such as Wysa and Woebot received over 1 million downloads, the data said.
Corenia Smith, director of the Birth Justice Collaborative in Minnesota, said that while popularizing tools like chatbots can help broaden healthcare access, it is important to avoid a "one size fits all" and ensure that AI can reflect the communities it serves.
"There are cultural practices that exist and have existed for thousands of years that people still use," Smith said. "A human could talk about all their experience and what they've seen and give referrals. When you reach that limitation with an AI, it has to have the ability to hand over care or make a referral in a way where people don't feel dropped."
The role of a doula
The AI chatbot Dua aims to function like a doula, providing mothers with information about the pregnancy experience during a time of transition.
Doulas are trained professionals who can provide non-medical, continuous physical, emotional, and information support for women before, during, and after childbirth, helping to reduce mental health-related morbidity for the mother and reduce infant mortality rates.
Access to doulas can be costly. While there's Medicaid coverage for doulas in several states, not all private health insurance plans cover these expenses. Long wait times and socioeconomic inequality also contribute to increased levels of stress and lack of healthcare usage among mothers and pregnant people.
"Traditionally, it's been something that's been available only to folks with a lot of money and a lot of resources. The people that benefit the most from doula care are those that might not trust the healthcare system," said Dr. Devon Rupley, an attending physician and OB/GYN specialist at NYC Health. "That tends to be people of color who've had previously negative experiences with racism and bias that can really harm their experience in the healthcare system generally."
Rupley added that using an AI healthcare app to address basic questions can allow patients to spend higher-quality time with doctors by asking high-level questions and discussing their healthcare issues.
How to design an empathetic AI chatbot
Soula enlisted real-life doulas to help train its chatbot and strike the right tone.
"We can't create it to be as personable as talking to a real-life person, but we can try to create that as much as possible," said Lexi Pacheco, a doula from Arizona who worked to help refine the dialogue in Soula's chatbot Dua. For $22 per hour, she helped improve the chatbot by using it "hand-in-hand" during her pregnancies, adding in her expertise.
While asking questions on Google could yield more informational responses, Pacheco said mothers would want something that provided "more of that reassurance that Google wouldn't."
For Armani Grant, a Soula user who became pregnant at 18, Google felt overwhelming. The chatbot allowed her to ask questions that she wouldn't feel comfortable asking her mother.
Pacheco said many women she's worked with reported similar experiences.
"They might even feel incompetent to ask the question, which no woman should ever feel, but with my history of working with people, they definitely tend to revert to: I'm sorry, I'm asking this question for some reason, and that might just be because of the societal pressure that more medicalized doctors have put on people that they don't give the time and day to us," Pacheco said.
The app isn't meant to completely replace a doula. Moreover, retention rates of AI healthcare chatbots can be low, said Johannes Eichstaedt, a computational social scientist and assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University. The high dropout rates for healthcare apps are "an elephant in the room," he said.
At the same time, Pacheco said AI bots can help "calm nerves" and fill the gaps when patients feel they are "bothering" their healthcare providers.
"AI isn't like a healthcare provider to give you guidance, but it's supposed to be there to give you a little bit more comfort," Pacheco said.