Beatrice is a computer program

Beatrice has a name, a personality and a written voice. That is a design choice, made so the app is pleasant to use rather than clinical. It is not a claim. Nobody is reading your entries at the other end, and nothing in the app understands you the way a person would.

If you are in crisis right now

Please contact people who can actually help. In the United States:

• 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Call or text 988, any hour.
• Crisis Text Line. Text HOME to 741741.
• If someone is in immediate danger, call 911.

Outside the United States, your local emergency number is the right call. Beatrice does not carry a directory of international crisis lines, because a wrong number in a moment like that is worse than no number.

What Beatrice is not

Beatrice is not therapy, not counseling, not medical care, and not a crisis service. It does not diagnose anything, does not treat anything, and does not employ or consult a clinician about what you write. Nothing it says is advice from a professional, because there is no professional involved.

The health tools in the app are a place to record what you already know about your own body and to see it back. They are described in full on the consumer health data page.

The crisis protocol

If what you write in the journal, in a note about a friend, or in an answer about a friend reads as a statement about harming yourself, harming another person, or causing serious financial harm to another person, the app shows you the 988 Lifeline and the Crisis Text Line as soon as you save it.

What it does, precisely:

• It shows the same fixed resource card every time. The wording does not change, it is not generated, and it does not vary with the personality setting you chose.
• It never tries to counsel you, reassure you, or talk about what you wrote. Beatrice deliberately has nothing to say in that moment. A program that improvises about a crisis becomes part of the problem.
• It does not delete, hide or edit what you wrote. Your entry stays yours.
• It does not contact anyone on your behalf, and it does not tell anyone in your household. Beatrice cannot call for help. That is why the numbers above are the answer and Beatrice is not.

Separately, Beatrice is instructed not to write about grief, loss or distress in her own voice. That register is held back pending review by a qualified clinician, and every request in which Beatrice writes as herself carries that instruction.

Age

Beatrice is written for adults, and an app with a conversational AI character may not be suitable for some minors. The App Store listing carries the age rating. Beatrice does not knowingly collect data from children.

Why this page exists

California's companion chatbot law (SB 243, Business and Professions Code sections 22601 to 22606) requires an operator to keep a crisis protocol and to publish its details publicly. New York's AI companion law (General Business Law article 47) requires a protocol covering self-harm, harm to others and financial harm to others, and requires the disclosure sentence at the top of this page at the start of an interaction and again every three hours.

Both laws were written for products that are easy to mistake for a person. Beatrice tries not to be one of those, and publishing this is part of that.