FAQs

The Everyday Mental Health by Wysa (EMH-Wysa App) AI Coach is an artificial intelligence-based 'emotionally intelligent' service which responds to the emotions you express and uses evidence-based cognitive-behavioral techniques (CBT), DBT, meditation, breathing, yoga, motivational interviewing and micro-actions to help you build mental resilience skills and feel better.

The App has an artificial intelligence (AI) coach, it’s a pocket penguin which learns and grows wiser with you. The AI Coach is restricted in the means of response and the intended usage is for providing evidence-based tools and techniques to manage emotions and encourage mental well-being. It is not intended for providing diagnosis, treatment or cure of a condition or disease or disorders. The AI Coach cannot and will not offer advice on unrecognizable issues.

The App is designed to help people who are experiencing low mood, stress or anxiety, or who are interested in improving their emotional resilience. Wysa will provide evidence-based tools and techniques and encourage you to maintain your mental well-being. You can type ‘Help’ anywhere in the conversation to see all the things the AI Coach can help you with.

Learning skills to manage our emotional resilience is important for everyone. However, if you are currently receiving therapy for a long-term mental health condition, discuss the App with your clinician as part of your care plan.

The App is not designed to assist with crises such as abuse, those with an eating disorder, psychosis, severe mental health conditions that may cause feelings of suicide, harm to self and any other medical emergencies. In any of these cases and otherwise, Wysa cannot and will not offer medical or clinical advice. It can only suggest that users seek advanced and professional medical help.

The Wysa platform is the result of a year-long co-design effort between a 15-people team of psychologists, designers, developers and over 500,000 users to understand how AI chat can help us learn skills to build emotional resilience.

We learnt two important things. First, that privacy is key. So, we decided that all chats will be safe and secured. Second, that people don't want their problems ‘fixed’. Mostly, they just want to talk through them, with someone who doesn't judge.

An AI-based chat platform can be great for those 4 am conversations. We all have a dark place, and have feelings we don't share with anyone else.

Talking to the App about these gives us the confidence to reach out for help when we’re ready - from friends, family or a Coach or a Therapist.

Ten hours of in-person therapy are rarely enough to break long held thought-patterns. In addition to building skills, AI-based conversations are also an easy, private way to practice these skills when learnt in therapy.

You may use the App and services if you are authorised to use by your Institution. Where applicable, your Institution may seek your and your parental or guardian consent before directing you to use the App.

The App uses evidence-based techniques like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which are suggested and approved by professional psychologists at Wysa for use in a self-help context, and by our scientific advisory board comprising of leading mental health professionals from around the world. Guided Programs using these evidence-based techniques are also co-designed along with Institutions. The App, including but not limited to its content, images, videos, tools and techniques, gets reviewed and approved by our qualified psychologists and safety professionals, and the updates are released as part of our bi-weekly development process. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any major changes in your levels of physical activity or if you have a medical condition. Do not use physical activity-based tools if you are suffering from eating disorder, pyschosis, back problems, blood pressure, hernia, any disability or any other medical conditions.

To ensure that our user interface design and visual design are more accessible to people with disabilities, we align to WCAG requirements (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), assess any new changes, and update elements that need to be modified to follow WCAG principles.

The WCAG requirements we work on are:

-Providing sufficient contrast between foreground and background so that all users should be able to read the text on our app/website and determine what our app/web page elements are supposed to do.

-Providing clear and consistent navigation options so that the different parts of our app/web page are easy to locate and identify.

-Using headings and spacing to group related content, reducing clutter and making it easier to scan and understand.

-Ensuring that form elements include clearly associated labels. We ensure that the label for any interactive component within our app/web content makes the component's purpose clear.

-Creating designs for different viewport sizes, making it easier to read and navigate the content on different screen sizes.

We also follow Apple iOS and Google Android provided design guidelines and best practices.

Please read our Accessibility Statement.

Wysa’s ethos is that everybody should have access to quality wellbeing support in a way that suits them, and we work closely with users from all over the world to ensure Wysa incorporates and reflects the views and needs of a variety of people. From clinical professionals to everyday members of the public, we take your feedback very seriously and use it to help our product grow. We use comments left for us in the app store or in feedback to the app to help make important changes, and we set up specialist co-design groups to help us support our research projects. Until now, there have been over 350 app iterations from reviews and feedback received from 500K users from 65+ countries. We have incorporated feedback from various user groups like students, caregivers, under-represented communities and people living with chronic conditions.

Until now, there have been over 350 app iterations from reviews and feedback received from 500K users from 65+ countries. We have incorporated feedback from various user groups like students, caregivers, under-represented communities, and people living with chronic conditions.

Wysa ensures a > 99% service availability of its App and Services.