why out loud?
speaking is really helpful in maintaining alertness, and enforces the practice of choosing a word (noting mode) or longer bit of speech (exploration mode) for your experience; this helps build your internal vocabulary, and a better internal vocabulary lets you understand yourself better.
plus, in my experience there's something special about voice-based practice that I don't have a complete explanation for; I just seem to have deeper experiences when my mind and body are being engaged in that way.
why make this?
I've had amazing experiences with practices like the ones in this app and wanted to make them accessible to everyone. exploration mode resembles both human-guided somatic exploration and the AI-powered meditation I did on my Jhourney retreat; I've had light jhana experiences with both. I've also done a lot of group noting sessions and find that it helps me go deeper than I would usually on my own. it's best with humans but the mechanics still work well here.
why AI? won't it feel cold or too sycophantic?
in noting mode, AIs are optional and just say one or two words at a time.
exploration mode by nature needs a partner that can give useful responses. the prompts have been carefully crafted to reflect the idea that the AI is here to be a facilitator for your own exploration, not to tell you what to do or believe. AI is not perfect, but in my experience this works pretty well. the newer models even have enough emotional intelligence to sometimes suggest useful avenues of inquiry.
you always have full freedom in choice of LLM.
what's parts work / IFS?
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a popular framing of parts work - in parts work, the mind is seen as having a collection of "parts" rather than a single voice. you've probably said something like "part of me wants to be productive but another part just wants to binge Netflix" - this just takes that idea seriously. it can be a really powerful way to investigate internal conflict or deeper emotions.
aloud. can be a partner for your parts work if you choose the "parts" focus.
are my conversations or other data stored anywhere?
your session transcripts are stored on your device but you can opt to not save sessions or delete them later. if you use a cloud AI model, your words go to that provider to generate a response, under their terms. if you choose cloud text-to-speech, they are only sent the AI's responses, not your words.
aloud. itself has no account, no tracking, and no server collecting your sessions. see privacy for details.
is this therapy?
no. it's a practice tool for meditation and self-exploration, not a substitute for an experienced human therapist. if something difficult or overwhelming comes up, please don't push it and please do reach out to a professional for support.
do i have to pay anything?
no. aloud. is free and open source. you can run it fully local with ollama, or use a cloud provider's free tier (like groq). tips are welcome and help cover the developer license and hosting, but nothing is paywalled.
