Social Healing Bot

RELATIONAL HEALING

Healing is relational. That’s the “so obvious, it’s invisible” gap we’re building into: we need each other to heal.

We think insights into what helps us heal are everywhere, and people who know something profound about healing are all around us. So far, it’s been up to each of us to find the people and insights that can help us heal, largely on our own. But it doesn’t have to be that way. This is why we developed the Social Healing Bot.

Guiding Principles

Collaborative by design. Because to heal together, we’ll need to listen, imagine, and create together.
Building from scientific rigor & social context. Data can tell us about what it means to heal well, and our souls can tell us, too.
Open to experts & the everyday. Siloes created a fragmented healing landscape — connecting across diverse expertise and lived experiences will transform it.

The Experience in a Nutshell

To build a prototype, our backend engineer developed a custom API on top of Telegram. We created a Healing Bot to deliver prompts to participants at key times, store their audio files, generate transcripts, and nudge them when they had a reply from a partner.

To keep everything friendly, invitational, and audio-based, our operations lead personally recorded each voice prompt used by the Healing Bot.

In Diary Mode, participants receive daily prompts for private reflection, inviting them to record a series of voice notes exploring their relationship to a major loss in their life. (In future iterations, each voice note will automatically generate a transcript, and both voice and text files will be searchable & categorizable)

In Conversation Mode, participants opt in to share their story of loss with a partner (another Social Audio Journal user, whom the participant doesn’t previously know). Pairs can be located anywhere in the world, and be exploring any form of loss and healing. Each participant in the pair is given 4 instructions: To tell a personal story of loss and healing, and to listen deeply to their partner’s story; to ask at least 3 reflective questions, and to answer the questions their partner asks them.

This conversational give-and-take repeats over several days (all via asynchronous voice notes), while pairs explore questions, challenges, breakthroughs, and reflections together.