Overview
Soulace is a US-based mental health initiative offering trauma-informed tools for youth and adults navigating anxiety and emotional distress. To test their concept without overspending, 26bitz built a text-based Telegram chatbot focused on anger regulation and grounding. This pilot allowed Soulace to validate live conversation flows with an early focus group before investing in heavy infrastructure.
Challenges of chatbots
While deploying basic chatbots is straightforward, building an AI tool for mental health care creates technical and safety hurdles:
- Prompt attacks: LLMs face prompt manipulation and exploits that alter the bot's core behavior.
- Off-topic responses: Generative models naturally wander, requiring hard guardrails to keep conversations anchored to grounding and anger management.
- Medical advice: The system must avoid giving medical diagnoses, clinical treatment, or acting as a crisis line replacement.
Intelligent AI prototype
26bitz built the prototype on the client's infrastructure, focusing on core features:
- Modular prompt admin: Non-technical staff can adjust, rearrange, and test prompt fragments in real time via a custom back office.
- Context memory: Paired LangChain with PostgreSQL to maintain conversation memory without storing raw text logs outside the database.
- Security: Added secret token rotation to incoming webhooks to block unauthenticated requests.
Results
The prototype successfully transitioned from a conceptual roadmap into an active testing asset:
- 4-week rollout: Delivered a working text pilot on schedule.
- Conversation logging: Structured interaction logs support safety reviews and crisis-signal analysis.
- Instant updates: All edits apply immediately within Telegram, enabling fast iterations.
Testimonial
“I just wanted to say wow — I absolutely love the prototype. It’s far more advanced than I expected. Without any additional programming, it’s already guiding the user effectively — which wasn’t part of our original commands or instructions, yet it handled it beautifully.
It also empathizes extremely well. That journaling capability wasn’t even part of the de-escalation techniques we programmed, but it executed them perfectly too. This is way beyond what I expected for a prototype. Fantastic work.”
— Joel Finch, President & Chair of the Board of Directors at Soulace Project
What’s Next
The text pilot proved the core conversational workflows, so Soulace is building out the full platform. The immediate focus is adding voice support, integrating structured anger-management techniques, and launching web and mobile apps.
