Case study: Yana, an AI bot for a family psychologist

Yana is an AI bot for a family psychologist, on Telegram. It answers in the psychologist's approach and from their material, and it understands voice messages.

The task

Messages arrive at the psychologist at night and at weekends, and the reply has to be fast. A text bot with fixed buttons did not fit: people describe their situation in their own words, and there is no button to match.

The second requirement was legal and medical. The subject is sensitive, and the bot has no business inventing things that are not in the psychologist's material.

What we did

Answers from the psychologist's material

Yana answers from the specialist's work: methods, formats, typical situations. The answer is built from the material, not from general psychology folklore off the internet.

Voice

The bot takes voice messages, transcribes them and replies with voice too, which feels more natural to many clients than typing.

Limits and hand-off

On questions outside the material Yana does not make something up: it says plainly that it does not know and passes the question to the specialist. This was a requirement from the start.

Quality checking

Before handover we ran a set of typical questions and reviewed the answers with the psychologist: where the wording worked and where it sounded like a robot.

Screenshots

A conversation with Yana: an answer from the psychologist's material

A voice message: Yana understands and replies

Yana — a family psychologist's bot