AVATAR therapy: a promising new approach for persistent distressing voices

AVATAR therapy was invented and first described by J. Leff and colleagues1. The therapy involves a three‐way conversation between therapist, patient and a digital simulation (“avatar”) of one of his/her hallucinated voices. The avatar comprises a visual representation of the agent that the patient believes is responsible for the voice and uses a speech transformation software to change the therapist's voice into a close match of the vocal characteristics (e.g., tone and pitch) of the voice that the patient has chosen for the therapy