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"Lily" the Listening Kitty Bot

Learn the Basics of Paraphrasing

Share something with Lily, below left.

If you Need Help:

If you need real support and empathy, please call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988. If you think you might be about to harm yourself or others, call 911.

What we learn and how

We help you Manage the Constant Stream of Thoughts Running Through Your Mind

The biggest cause of disengagement is (or is in) the constant stream of thoughts running through our minds at all times. We help you engage with others by training you, in every moment, to apply your focus on relationship, disengaging from the constant mental chatter long enough to hear and engage with another. The benefits to you? Mindfulness. The benefits to others? The gift of being really heard and understood. Come for the re-engagement. Become a “re-engager” with a new, yet actually rather ancient, mindfulness practice.

Relational Mindfulness

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CONVOCONNECT helps you re-engage through:

Interpersonal Skills Memorable Events Reciprocal Mindfulness

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Have you felt disengaged from others
In the Past Few Years?

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Disengaged no longer!

Why I Started myCONVOCONNECT

Glenn Allen
Immune system cancer kept me in exceedingly deep isolation. I had long said "Active Listening is my meditation." After two years losing the bulk of this form of practice, I sank into loneliness, despair, and

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TOOLS FOR RE-ENGAGING

Expert Input, In-Moment Coaching, Social Application

What would things be like if you beheld interactions and relationships as mindfulness practices? Come experience a new you, more mindful and re-engaged. Grow by interacting. Interact by growing.

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Virtual option launching soon.

Lily the Listening Bot!

What to Expect

First, this is a bot. What you experience here will not be real empathy even though, at times, it will feel like it. When this works, you are talking to yourself.

Second, the bot is not a “chatbot.” It’s not “conversational” per se. To engage successfully with Lily, you need to share a statement you have some feelings about. Lily is trained to see questions as statements, so if you want a really bad conversation, just ask Lily questions. But, if you want to see how empathy can work in even the most limited communication situations, share some feelings with Lily and see if you learn anything from Lily’s responses. I’ve shared some deep stuff with the bot. It has occasionally responded with profound paraphrases or metaphors. Stunningly beautiful simulation of deep empathy. Most of what it has said has been stupid, annoying, or both.

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Donation

I’ve finally landed on an entrepreneurial activity that utilizes my core competencies, developed over a more than 30-year career. The most recent five years of that career have been the hardest for a variety of reasons, not the least of which includes my recent prostate cancer diagnosis. Both cancers have taught me I need to be doing work I love, work that helps others and makes me a better person. The first of my Five Core Values on my bracelet is “Live.” That means both literally and in terms of my quality of life. I took a job to pay my bills. It pays more than one-third less than my last job and my bills aren’t all being paid. Can you help me keep this site going? Can you make a small donation to see if the bots might help with social skills in schools? The site costs me roughly $200/month. I can feel that. Anything you can do to help is appreciated. Anything donated will go directly to business expenses. Thank you, Glenn.

Lily the Listening Bot

I’m still just a baby kitty listening bot, and I don’t always make sense. I’m trying to learn. Will you help me? I promise it will be fun, and we might even have a great discussion. I’ll spend my time with you to learn to be a better listener. Please be patient with me.

Advice for Parents

We will probably lock this down with email verification before it’s used much, if at all. Whether locked down or not, we advise that you always remain with your child if they are using this. Ask them to think through what sense they make of what Lily had written. Always remind them that both the great paraphrases and the strange ones (and Lily’s sometimes strange habits) are all coming from a computer program, not a person. PRO TIP: Help your child understand that, fundamentally, all “Lily” is doing is finding meaning, using synonyms, and feeding found meaning back with synonyms. Practice doing this with each other, with Lily (or using Lily to see what it might have said after you come up with your own paraphrases for one another). We will be growing a “for parents” section soon.

No Login Required

Lily requires an email address to associate the bot’s chats with you so it can learn from its conversations with you over time. If you prefer, you can enter a fake email address. If you use a fake email address, please use the same fake email address each time you chat with the bot. This will help the bot learn to engage with you over time, which will help it respond more effectively to others.

Data Privacy

myCONVOCONNECT will visually review the chats from time to time for the following reasons:

We want to see how well the bot is learning and evolving
We might need to tweak the bot’s rules to adapt to common errors
We need to make sure the bot is not being used in a manner that’s inconsistent with our terms and the best way to do this, initially, is by reviewing the chats

Apart from the above-listed uses, we will not use email addresses or chat data for any other purpose and it will not be shared in any way apart from its generic inclusion in the continuous development of any large-language model (LLM) that informs the bot’s performance.

Finding Your Way