Abstract
Accurate transcription of audio recordings in psychotherapy would improve therapy effectiveness, clinician training, and safety monitoring. Although automatic speech recognition software is commercially available, its accuracy in mental health settings has not been well described. It is unclear which metrics and thresholds are appropriate for different clinical use cases, which may range from population descriptions to individual safety monitoring. Here we show that automatic speech recognition is feasible in psychotherapy, but further improvements in accuracy are needed before widespread use. Our HIPAA-compliant automatic speech recognition system demonstrated a transcription word error rate of 25%. For depression-related utterances, sensitivity was 80% and positive predictive value was 83%. For clinician-identified harm-related sentences, the word error rate was 34%. These results suggest that automatic speech recognition may support understanding of language patterns and subgroup variation in existing treatments but may not be ready for individual-level safety surveillance.
Highlights
Psychotherapy has proven effective at treating a range of mental health disorders, we have limited insight into the relationship between the structure and linguistic content of therapy sessions and patient outcomes[1,2,3,4,5,6]
Sentences spoken by the patient were not significantly different from sentences spoken by the therapist in terms of word error rate (32% vs 36%, two-tailed Mann–Whitney U-test, p = 0.60) and semantic distance
We proposed the use of semantic distance, clinical terminology, and clinician-labeled utterances to better quantify Automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance in psychotherapy
Summary
Psychotherapy has proven effective at treating a range of mental health disorders, we have limited insight into the relationship between the structure and linguistic content of therapy sessions and patient outcomes[1,2,3,4,5,6]. This gap in knowledge limits insights into causal mechanisms of patient improvement, the evaluation and refinement of treatments, and the training of future clinicians[7]. Manual transcription is expensive and time consuming[12], leaving most psychotherapy unscrutinized[3]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
