Common questions about Intentioned.tech and social skills training
Modern large language models (LLMs) like Qwen, Gemma, and others already have extensive built-in safety guardrails and content filtering. These models are trained to refuse harmful requests, avoid generating dangerous content, and maintain ethical boundaries by default.
Adding an overly strict moderation layer on top of these already-cautious models creates a problematic "double filtering" effect that severely impedes innocent conversations. Users practicing difficult scenarios—like handling an angry customer, negotiating assertively, or discussing sensitive topics in therapy contexts—would constantly trigger false positives.
Our moderation is designed to catch only the most extreme cases (direct, actionable threats to real individuals) while allowing the natural flow of difficult conversation practice. The underlying LLM handles the rest.
Yes, absolutely! If you find the default moderation prompt doesn't fit your needs, you can fully customize it in the configuration tool.
Some use cases where you might want to adjust moderation:
Because it is—and there's a good reason for that.
Intentioned.tech is developed by a single person and an assistant (Ari Kotler and Gianni Latella) as an Honors Thesis project at Pace University. There is no team of developers, no corporate backing, and no venture capital funding. Every line of code, every design decision, and every feature is the work of two individuals balancing this with academic coursework and life responsibilities.
The "vibe coded" approach allows rapid iteration and feature development that would be impossible for a solo developer using traditional methods. The alternative would be a project that takes 5 years instead of months, or never ships at all.
If you find bugs or issues, please report them. Solo development means things slip through the cracks—but it also means fixes can be deployed quickly without bureaucratic approval processes.
The demo is currently private and password-protected for security and quality control reasons:
The demo is accessible via the "Launch Demo" button in the navigation bar at the top of the home page. You can also find it in the hero section of the landing page.
The demo provides a full experience of Intentioned.tech's conversation practice capabilities, including:
Intentioned.tech supports a wide range of language models through HuggingFace Transformers:
Configure your model in the config.json file or through the configuration tool.
Models are automatically downloaded from HuggingFace on first use.
Intentioned.tech is currently an Honors Thesis research project. While the software itself is new, it is built on well-established research in several fields:
We are actively collecting data (with user consent) to publish formal efficacy studies. If you're interested in participating in research or collaborating academically, please contact us.
Pricing has not been finalized yet. The software is currently in beta/demo phase as we gather user feedback and refine the product.
Sign up for our mailing list or follow the project to be notified when pricing is announced.
We understand that many regions face severe economic challenges, including currency devaluation, hyperinflation, or de facto dollarization that makes international software services unaffordable.
We may be able to offer you an affordable plan on a case-by-case basis if you can provide:
This is a valid concern, especially for users in the United States and Europe where tariffs on electronics can significantly impact pricing. Here's our perspective:
We monitor hardware markets and will update our recommendations as conditions change.
We do not currently offer hardware installation services.
Intentioned.tech is a software product. However, we understand that not everyone is comfortable installing GPUs or setting up AI environments. Here are some resources:
Intentioned.tech is designed to be language-universal, especially for the EU market:
To configure language settings, adjust the STT language parameter in your configuration or contact us for enterprise multilingual deployments.
Every answer here describes what the product actually does, verified against the code — not a legal conclusion about which state or federal statute's definitions it falls under. Where a compliance artifact (a signed data-processing agreement, a SOC 2 report) doesn't currently exist, this says so directly.
Intentioned.tech is a conversation-practice tool: you pick a scenario (a job interview, a parent-teacher conference, a networking event, general conversation, and others), talk to an AI playing a role in that scenario, and get feedback afterward on things like filler words, speaking pace, and how you structured what you said. Several states — New York, California, Oregon, and Washington among them — have laws that define "companion chatbot" or similar terms and impose duties (AI disclosure, crisis-referral information, break reminders, and more depending on the state) on products that meet those definitions.
No. Intentioned.tech is not offered, marketed, or configured for clinical or therapeutic use. No persona in the product is intended to claim to be a licensed mental health professional — that's a standing product constraint — but as of this writing no audit has been run to confirm that none of the product's built-in or operator-configured scenario prompts actually do this. Treat this as a design intent that hasn't yet been checked, not a verified guarantee.
No AI system in this product infers your emotional state from your voice, face, or any other signal. This was directly verified against the code:
What's verified so far:
What this doesn't yet cover: a complete, audited list of every network call the product makes under every configuration. Treat this answer as accurate for the defaults described above, not as an exhaustive guarantee, until that audit is done.
Yes, separately from and never as punishment for anything else. If something you say indicates possible self-harm, suicidal ideation, or a similar crisis, the product shows a notice — separately from anything the AI character says, labeled as coming from the app itself — with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline's number and link, plus the Crisis Text Line. This never counts against you, blocks your session, or is treated as a content violation.
Separately, if a conversation contains repeated policy-violating content (unrelated to a crisis disclosure — things like harassment or requests the AI has to refuse), the product tracks that: at 3 distinct violations in one session, a summary is saved for the operator running that server to review; at 5, the session ends. Two severe violations end a session immediately, without waiting for either count above. Because self-harm disclosures are tracked completely separately from this system, having a hard conversation about something painful does not risk hitting this threshold.
This depends entirely on who operates the specific instance you're using — Intentioned.tech is self-hosted software, not a service the company runs and can see into by default. On the instance's default privacy track, your conversation data is retained locally for a set number of days and then deleted, and the company does not receive it. If you opt in to the alternative track (for continuity across sessions), your data is retained until you delete it or withdraw consent, and is used only for your own analytics — not shared with the company by default. Whoever operates the server you're talking to (which could be you, your employer, or your school, depending on deployment) can access the data stored on that server, same as any self-hosted software; see the questions below for what that means for a school-run deployment specifically.
The product has an age-band system with an adult mode and a more restrictive teen mode, both implemented today; a further child-specific mode is designed but deliberately not turned on — specifically so it can't half-work under a label that promises protections it doesn't yet have. Which mode applies to a given user or deployment is a setting that's declared, not verified: the product does not check or estimate anyone's age, so a wrong or unset declaration isn't caught.
Whatever the school's own instance is configured to retain: by default, session transcripts and feedback are stored on the server the school runs, for a configurable number of days, then deleted. If a student's account opts in to extended history, that student's data is retained until deleted, on that same school-operated server.
FERPA obligations run to the educational agency or institution, not to a software vendor directly — a school using Intentioned.tech in a self-hosted deployment is the one that holds the FERPA compliance obligation for the data on its own server, the same as it would for any other self-hosted tool it operates. Where a vendor relationship requires FERPA-relevant contractual terms (a "school official" designation, data-use limitations, and similar), those terms would need to be in a written agreement between the school and the company.
If it's enabled, potentially yes, and it's the district's determination to make, not this FAQ's. Under the "school official" exception districts commonly rely on for classroom software, the district must retain direct control over how a vendor and its sub-processors use and maintain education records.
Two things worth being precise about:
A district that requires one as part of procurement should treat this as a current gap, not something available on request.
A New York district evaluating this product will reasonably ask for a data privacy agreement meeting §2-d's requirements and a copy of the parents' bill of rights for data privacy and security.
Yes, optionally, and it's off by default. The webcam feature ("eye contact tracking") requires a student to explicitly click a "camera on" control in their session; it never activates automatically, and there is no separate district-level setting because it's already opt-in at the individual-session level — a student or the school can simply not enable it. When it is enabled, it detects whether a face is present in the video frame and nothing more (no expression, gaze, or identity information is computed or stored), and raw video never leaves the student's browser.
The same mechanism described above for any user: a system-level notice (not from the AI character) surfaces the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and the Crisis Text Line. There is currently no age-based substitution to a youth-specific line — every student receives the same fixed referral as every other user. This is independent of the district's own crisis-response protocols and does not replace them — it is a fixed, always-on notice built into the product, not a substitute for a school's own safeguarding obligations or staff notification procedures.
In a self-hosted deployment, the school or district is the operator of that specific instance: they install it, run it on their own infrastructure (or infrastructure they've contracted for), control its configuration, and hold the data it generates. Intentioned.tech (the company) provides the software and periodic updates but does not host the school's instance, does not have standing access to the data on it, and is not in the data path for a properly deployed self-hosted instance running under its default privacy settings.