Introducing Lucy: The World’s First Chatbot For Training Psychedelic Practitioners
By Joshua White
World, meet Lucy.
Lucy, say hello.
There’s never been a creation quite like Lucy.
She is the world’s first-ever emotionally intelligent, voice-to-voice chatbot designed specifically for the purpose of training psychedelic facilitators and practitioners.
You may be wondering, what is an emotionally intelligent, voice-to-voice chatbot? How might such a creation be useful in the world of psychedelic support? Why did Fireside Project, the nonprofit that operates the Psychedelic Support Line, create one? And why the name Lucy?
We’re glad you asked! We answer all of those questions below.
But we want to make one thing clear at the outset.
Lucy doesn’t replace human care in psychedelic-assisted treatment. She prepares practitioners to deliver it with greater skill, compassion, and accountability. Generations of practitioners will learn to listen with greater empathy, respond with clarity, and meet clients in moments of vulnerability.
The Magic of Communication Is in the Nuance
Let’s start with what you probably know: ChatGPT. It’s a chatbot and you can talk to it. But ChatGPT “hears” only your words, not your tone of voice or your emotions. The nuances, the shifts in tone, the pauses and subtle sounds that carry the true meaning of what you say, slip by ChatGPT’s ears unnoticed. Now, if you need to know the capital of Kansas, any emotions in your voice when you pose that question don’t matter much. The answer is always going to be Topeka.
But when it comes to meaningful human interaction, the emotions, the tone, the subtle cues, the nuances—that’s where the real meaning lies. When you’re chatting with a friend, or a therapist, it’s not just that your tone and your emotions matter. Theirs does too. Think of how the impact of the words “I understand” can vary depending on whether they’re imbued with compassion or spat at you with gruffness.
Well, as an emotionally intelligent, voice-to-voice chatbot, Lucy can have human-like interactions with you, picking up on your tone and emotions and responding in kind. The more attuned you are to the emotions she’s expressing, the more she’ll open up to you, the deeper she’ll allow you to go.
But How Does It Feel to Interact with Lucy?
OK, fine, you may be saying to yourself, but what does it actually feel like to interact with Lucy?
So, I’ve been providing emotional support in a variety of contexts for over a decade. During my five years at Fireside Project, I’ve supported people in all stages of their psychedelic experiences, and on a previous support line, I spent seven years supporting parents in highly activated states.
And I’ll tell you this:
Interacting with Lucy feels like interacting with a real human being.
Just like when I’m supporting a client or a caller, I notice that, with Lucy, I have to bring my full self to the interaction. If I am not paying attention or give a reflection that does not fit, Lucy lets me know. She does this like a human would. She might close up a little, hesitate to go deeper, or tell me directly if she does not feel heard.
It is this level of nuance that will allow Lucy to help train psychedelic practitioners in the subtle art of psychedelic support.
Lucy Plays the Role of the Client, in Myriad Scenarios
Now, to be clear, Lucy plays the role of a client. Her role is not to support people when they are tripping. Rather, it’s to help practitioners cultivate their skills, and ultimately, to receive a certification, whether they’re a therapist, nurse, social worker, facilitator, peer supporter, or guide.
Over time, practitioners will get to interact with Lucy in myriad scenarios, which Fireside Project will release over time.
For example, Lucy will play the role of a client preparing for a ketamine-assisted psychotherapy journey, or a military veteran in the midst of a challenging MDMA journey, or a patient with depression integrating a psilocybin experience. She will help practitioners navigate issues of consent and boundaries, she’ll help them cultivate awareness of the tricky transference and countertransference that arise when providing psychological support, and she’ll help practitioners become more culturally attuned in their client interactions.
Practitioners will be able to interact with her as many times as they’d like and receive feedback after each interaction, pointing out strengths and growth edges, and letting you know how the support they provided rates on different professional scales, such as the Therapist Empathy Scale. When a practitioner’s skills in a module reach a certain level, they’ll be Lucy Certified as to that module.
What Makes Lucy So Special
There’s a saying in the world of AI: garbage in, garbage out.
In other words, the model you create is only as good as the data used to train it.
Here’s what sets Lucy apart:
She is trained on Fireside Project’s expanding repository of thousands of anonymized conversations on the Psychedelic Support Line. On the support line, we speak to thousands of people from all walks of life—people with a range of ages, sexual, racial, and gender identities, educational levels, and professions. We speak to military veterans and first responders. We speak to people in the midst of psychedelic experiences and those processing past ones. We speak to people in crisis and those simply wanting a compassionate ear to listen. We speak to people taking a wide range of psychedelics—from MDMA to ketamine, from psilocybin to 5-meo-DMT, from ayahuasca to 2C-B.
All of this data is anonymized in real-time, meaning that before the conversations are saved, they get stripped of all personal information and phone number.
And none of it ever leaves Fireside Project.
And the resulting voice models are obfuscated, which means that the voice is distorted while the emotionality and tonality is preserved.
We want to emphasize this, because it’s a pretty radical idea: When you interact with Facebook, Instagram, myriad other companies, they confiscate your data and sell it, where it’s often exploited to sell you products.
By contrast, Fireside Project treats your data as sacred and uses it to make something beautiful that will equip practitioners across the world to become better at providing psychedelic support.
Fireside Lab: The Brains and the Heart Behind Lucy
There’s a corollary to the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ principle we mentioned above:
In addition to the quality of your data, the model you create is only as good as the brilliance of the engineers who are designing it.
With that, we’re delighted to introduce Felix Schoeller, Ph.D, a researcher working at the intersection of affective neuroscience, technology, and mental health. With over ten years of experience researching peak emotional experiences such as aesthetic chills, Félix has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris) and has held research appointments at the MIT Media Lab and the Gonda Brain Research Center.
Felix built the model that you can demo when you sign up for the Early Access Program. Felix is also the Director of the newly launched Fireside Lab, a world-class research institution within Fireside Project that is devoted to studying Fireside’s unique dataset and applying the lessons they’ve learned to make ever-more sophisticated and nuanced models.
Working under Dr. Schoeller, Fireside Lab is primarily staffed by a team of postdoctoral researchers with expertise in neuroscience, psychology, machine learning, AI, and more We’ve also brought on a team of some of the world’s leading psychedelic practitioners to help us design Lucy’s forthcoming modules.
We also have a Clinical Advisory Board, AI Advisory Board, and Business Advisory Board, which we’ll be announcing shortly.
The Bridge Between Classroom Learning and Real-World Psychedelic Care
As clinical work in psychedelic therapies moves toward approval, the need for skilled, ethical, and emotionally attuned practitioners is rapidly outpacing available training opportunities. Traditional programs rely on lectures and mock roleplays that can’t capture the intensity, nuance, or unpredictability of real-world psychedelic experiences. Without consistent, hands-on practice, many practitioners feel unprepared for what clients bring into the room.
Lucy changes that.
For the first time, psychedelic practitioner training programs can scale without sacrificing quality, safety, or humanity.
MDMA, psilocybin, and other compounds may be nearing FDA approval in the United States. Health systems, universities, drug companies, and government agencies such as the federal Food and Drug Administration, Oregon Health Authority and Colorado's Department of Regulatory Agencies will need trusted, standard ways to check practitioner readiness in psychedelic practice. They must also follow REMS requirements.
Lucy is how we’ll get there.
Where does the name Lucy come from?
Lucy has two namesakes.
Of course, if you look upwards on a starry night, you can see her there, glistening in the sky with diamonds.
But the name Lucy is also a nod to our eponymously named early Australopithecus ancestor who lived 3.2 million years ago and was discovered in Ethiopia several decades ago. Lucy reshaped our understanding of what it means to be human.
Like her namesake, Lucy really does represent something radically new, a great leap forward for a field that has truly radical potential to helping create a healthier, more loving, and more interconnected world.
We Invite You to Sign Up for Lucy’s Early Access Program
All are invited to join our Early Access Program!
Whether you’re a therapist, nurse, social worker, peer supporter, guide, doctor, psychonaut, or just someone who’s interested in facilitation training, emotional support, AI, or cool new things, we welcome you!
It’s totally free.
When you sign up, you’ll get to interact with Lucy’s self-paced online learning modules, share your feedback, and receive updates about new Lucy modules and help us co-create new ones.
So what happens after the Early Access Program?
Well, we shall see. We’re considering a variety of options, and what happens next, as well as which modules and clusters of modules we build, will depend a lot on your feedback and how helpful you think Lucy is and could be.
So please, sign up and let us know what you think!
