Sex Education Circa 2019: Teens Talk Sex With ‘Roo the Chatbot’

In an era when 96 percent of parents want their teenage kids to receive sex education in high school, but only 24 of the 50 United States require it (and unbelievably, only 13 states require medically accurate sex education), teens are often left with few resources for answers to what—even in today’s sexually saturated environment—can seem like awkward, embarrassing but important questions. As a result, sex education is now driven by artificial intelligence, at least in the case of the new “chatbot” created by Planned Parenthood and Work & Co, a digital development firm based in Brooklyn, New York: a “bot” that has answered nearly 800,000 questions in the first six months that it went online, starting in February.  The bot goes by the rather charming moniker “Roo,” and is available only via the Planned Parenthood website. Though Roo is of course smartphone-friendly, because most teens access the web primarily through their phones, research has also shown that teens are reluctant to download new apps onto their phones, making a web-based application more enticing. And because teenagers tend to grow up tech savvy, they are well aware of the privacy concerns posed by Facebook and other social media platforms whose true business is gathering and selling data, rather than actually serving users. Planned Parenthood, acutely aware of those well-justified fears, set up Roo to collect as little data as possible about its users, and to gurantee anonymity for teens who ask questions of the bot. Those questions, according to a report on Roo by the tech magazine Fast Company, include such common queries as “Is my vagina normal?” Or “What will happen to me if I masturbate too much?” as well as more practical questions, including “What’s the best method of birth control?” and emotionally sensitive ones, like the commonly asked, “How do I come out?” Though Roo was designed to provide answers in a conversational, friendly way, Ambreen Molitor—who heads Planned Parenthood’s  Digital Product Lab—said that teens don’t want Roo to feel too real. “Teens have a faster response time and are more willing to open up to a bot, because it lowers the risk that there is some sort of bias or judgment on the other side,” Molitor told Fast Company. As a “machine learning” bot, Roo was “trained” by taking questions and conversing with about 7,000 teens before launching in February, and continues to learn from the questions it receives every day—81 percent of them from teenagers, and 60 percent from people of color. “I think the younger generation is very much interested in who they are and what their values are,” Molityor said. “And I think that also falls into the whole theme of ‘Where do I fit on the spectrum of normal?'” The Roo chatbot can be accessed via Planned Parenthood at this link.  Photo via Planned Parenthood