The Long Players

When we first started testing Lingwell, I knew it could not be shaped by the short tablet-training encounters we devised alone. A single conversation can reveal a lot, but you only really start to know a voice when you have listened over time.

To get around this, we asked a small group of individuals for help. These are the people who have committed to sit down with Lingwell every day for weeks. Some of them are teachers. Some are veterans. Some are survivors of trauma or violence. Some are nurses, doctors, and healthcare workers. Some are in law enforcement. Some are in recovery or caring for those who are. Each of them carry experiences that reflect the kinds of weight Lingwell is built to help carry. They are the very voices Lingwell is being built for and built from.

Their commitment is not passive. They fill out surveys. They sit for interviews. They tell us what fits and what jars. What opens a door and what slams it shut. What feels like listening and what feels like interference. This feedback goes directly into the development of Lingwell. But beyond that, these initial conversations provide real world language for us to associate Lingwell’s custom programming to. I take components of these conversations to run stylistic analyses to look at cadence, phrasing, tone. We bring that back to the developers. Together we adjust the levers of Lingwell’s language, steering it away from the sterile sound of academic papers or machine outputs, and closer to the voice of a colleague, a neighbor, a fellow traveler.

This is slow work. Uneven work. Sometimes it feels like tuning a radio in a storm, trying to catch the signal beneath the static. But it is the only way to make sure Lingwell does not just “sound human,” but actually carries the imprint of real human voices.

So when we say Lingwell is “trained to the voices of the people it is built to serve,” this is not metaphor. It is not branding language. It is literally true.

These long-term users are one stream of that training. The tablet sessions, where we bring Lingwell into direct dialogue with people in specific contexts are another. Together, these streams shape Lingwell’s current. They make it of the people, by the people, for the people. They keep it from drifting off into the abstract or the artificial. Or, as I like to think of it, they keep it feeling honest.

In this, I feel like we are doing our part to offer a secure, quiet, and private space for people to unpack and process their thoughts, needs, and experiences. But we also work to offer this space in such a way that helps people feel more comfortable. Comfortable as they find a voice that helps them welcome themselves back to themselves. We are training our model on the natural language of those whose resilience is already founded in the stories they shaped and share with others. We hope to continue our work with Lingwell as an extension of their original intent to care.