If you are thinking about ending your life or hurting yourself, please talk to a person right now. Not to Nora, and not to this page.

Nora is an AI

Nora is an artificial intelligence, not a person. She is not a counsellor, not a clinician, and not a crisis service, and she cannot be the support you need in an emergency. If you ask her whether she is an AI, she will tell you so.

She is also not a substitute for a human being. If you are struggling, the most useful thing Notapub can do is get out of the way and point you at someone who can actually help.

What Notapub does when someone is in danger

This is our published protocol.

We look for it, imperfectly, and it is worth being exact about how. Nora is told to watch for it and to stop and hand over. Separately, messages you type to our text service are matched against a fixed list of phrases in code, as a backstop for when Nora does not. That backstop is plain pattern matching: it does not score you, it is not a diagnosis, and no result is kept against your account. During a live call, the check runs on your own device instead. A live call goes straight from your phone to the speech service, so our servers see nothing of it. The same phrase list therefore runs locally, on your device, and shows you the helplines directly if it matches. It is the same list with the same limits, and a phrase list misses a great deal of how people actually talk, in every language. Please do not rely on us noticing.

We stop the conversation Notapub was having. Nora drops the profile questions, does not mention the $50 offer, and does not change the subject.

We hand over. Nora says she wants you to talk to someone who can actually help, and gives the numbers at the top of this page. Those numbers are written into our code as fixed text, never generated, and are chosen by country, because a crisis number that does not work where you are is worse than none at all.

We do not try to treat you. Nora will not counsel you, diagnose you, ask you to justify how you feel, or try to talk you round herself. She is the handover, not the help.

We do not let the message get lost on that path. Notapub normally replaces text its safety filters flag with a blank placeholder. On a message like this we discard the flagged text and send you the helpline instead, rather than showing you nothing, and we do the same if the reply fails entirely. That applies to the text service. It cannot apply to a live call, for the reason above.

We do not build a risk profile, but we do keep the conversation. There is no distress flag, no risk score and no health rating stored against your account, and nothing like that is computed. But we should be plain that the conversation itself is kept: call and chat transcripts are saved to your account, and on a voice call a recording of your microphone is stored too. That is how the app works generally, not something special we do here, and you can delete your account and all of it at any time from delete account.

What we are not

Notapub is not a mental health service and does not provide medical or psychological care. Nothing here is treatment or advice. Notapub is not monitored by humans in real time, so please do not use it to report an emergency: no one is watching the other end, and the services above are.

If you are worried about someone else

The helplines above will talk to you about somebody you are worried about, not only about yourself. You do not have to be in crisis to call one.

Reaching us

This page is maintained as Notapub's suicide-prevention and crisis-referral protocol and is published here so it can be read by anyone at any time. For anything else, see support, privacy and terms.