Microsoft just filed a patent for an AI therapist app. How does that make you feel? According to the filing — as first caught by the Windows-watching folks at Microsoft Power User — the AI shrink, described as a “method and apparatus for providing emotional care in a session between a user and conversational agent,” is designed to provide users with emotional support, analyzing their feelings and carefully storing user information and conversations, so as to be able to build a “memory” of the user, their lives, and their emotional triggers. The model is apparently able to process both imagery and text, and importantly, seems to be outlined as less of an emergency service — if you’re in a serious emotional crisis, you’d definitely want to seek human help — and more of a general space for a user to be able to talk about life. As the AI gathers more information about its users, the filing suggests, it can start to pick up on certain emotional cues. Based on these cues, it might ask some prompting questions — and even, in some cases, make suggestions for how the user might deal with their issues. As one figure provided by Microsoft shows, a message from a user reading that they’re “feeling so bad these days” prompts the AI to ask: “what happened?” When the user answers that family woes have gotten them feeling tired, the AI suggests that the user might consider going on a “30-minute run for refreshing.” But Microsoft…Microsoft Patents AI-Powered Therapy App