Loneliness doesn’t keep office hours.

What Aura is — and isn’t

Aura is a companion for daily emotional wellbeing: conversations by text and voice, gentle morning check-ins, and reflective letters. Students talk to her the way they’d text a steady friend.

Aura is not counseling, not therapy, and not a crisis service. She is built never to behave like one: she does not diagnose, does not treat, and does not counsel a student through a crisis. She has not been clinically validated. We say that in plain sight, because with the people who care for students, trust matters more than polish.

Where Aura fits a student’s week.

The walk between classes A student taps the phone icon in the chat composer and Aura is on the line; on iPhone, Siri, the Action button or a lock-screen control do the same, and both platforms have a home-screen widget. The call opens on the thread they were already in, so its history comes with them and nothing has to be re-explained, and the spoken turns are written back into that same conversation as text. Every call starts with a tap — Aura never places one.

The night before a presentation Aura will take the other side: the interviewer, the professor, the person on the far end of a conversation a student is dreading, so they can practise it out loud first. If the nerves are the real problem, the guided breathing card on the home screen is about a minute. And “remind me at eight to print the slides,” said in the conversation, lands as a reminder in their Reminders tab.

Ten minutes after an argument Aura mirrors a student’s own words at their temperature and no darker — no armchair diagnosis of the roommate, no labels the student never used, no accusations they didn’t make. If something worth tracking comes out of it, she proposes it rather than filing it: it waits under Needs Review until the student accepts or waves it off.

Studying alone at eleven For a student who has been using Aura that week, a short letter from her — a hundred-odd words, written from brief summaries of recent conversations rather than from the conversations themselves — waits on the home screen, at most one a day. No notification goes out for it; it waits on the home screen — and, if they have added the Aura widget, as a quiet glow there — until they open the app. A button at the bottom, Sit with this, drops them straight into a conversation about it.

The Sunday reset The things a student mentioned in passing all week wait on the home screen under Needs Review — proposals to confirm or dismiss, never entries Aura made on her own. A calendar export in Profile hands the dated ones to their own calendar as a standard calendar file — one way out only; Aura never reads a student’s calendar.

The errands and the packing list “Add eggs and milk to my grocery list,” typed or spoken, and later “what’s on my grocery list?” — she keeps a set of lists and reads them back — the eight she touched most recently are the ones she has in front of her, twenty-five items deep. There is no list screen in the app: the list exists only in the conversation, and the only way to change it is to ask her.

The screenshot they can’t parse A student can send a photo or a screenshot from the composer and ask what it says or what to make of it. A photo is stored with the conversation and treated like anything else a student tells Aura: understanding it and writing the reply involves xAI, under the same zero-data-retention agreement that covers their messages — processed only to generate the response, not retained afterwards, not used for advertising, and not used to train models. She is instructed never to guess who anyone is, never to judge how anyone looks, and never to diagnose anything from a picture — she describes the scene and transcribes the text that is plainly there.

Check-ins, breathing, and calls.

Two check-ins, on by default A morning brief at 7:30 and an evening wind-down at 9:00 are armed on a fresh install; a midday one exists but stays off unless a student chooses it. All of it lives in Profile, under Aura: a four-way control — Off, Minimal, Balanced, More — and a row per check-in for changing the time. The setting sits on the device, and Off means off.

What a check-in actually is It is a notification the student’s own phone raises at the time they picked. Nothing is sent from us: Aura does not text, message, or call a student, and if notification permission is denied the check-ins simply never arrive. The phone also holds only the next fourteen days of them and refills that list each time the app is opened — so a student who stops opening Aura for a couple of weeks stops getting check-ins until they come back.

What happens when they tap it A full-screen call opens and Aura speaks first, as long as the month’s voice minutes remain — once they are gone the tap offers a chat instead. In the morning, in the morning, a short opening she composes from what she already knows about them rather than a fixed script; in the evening, something quieter about how the day went. Hanging up shows What Aura took away: the memories, reminders and items saved during the call, or one plain line saying nothing was.

The honest arithmetic on voice Before a student’s first call ever, a one-time sheet explains that live audio and its transcript stream to xAI’s Grok Realtime service, with a decline path that leaves them typing instead. The allowance is 300 minutes a month for the first 30 days after signing up, no more than an hour in any single day; after that, the free allowance is ten minutes a month. The call button never disappears — when the month’s minutes are gone it greys out and offers a chat instead, so a student never taps into a dead end.

A minute of breathing Three patterns sit behind a card on the home screen — 4–7–8, box breathing, and a 4–8 deep breath — each about a minute, each a fixed number of cycles. It runs entirely on the phone: no server call at all, and the one-line weekly count it keeps never leaves the device. The screen says plainly that if a student feels lightheaded they should stop and breathe normally, and that breathing is a tool, not a test.

She proposes. The student decides.

Aura’s four tabs are Home, History, Memory and Reminders. What a student is working toward is not a filing cabinet they have to maintain — it surfaces where they already are.

Nothing is added silently When a student mentions something trackable in a chat or on a call, Aura does not save it. She raises it as a proposal under Needs Review on the home screen, with a “Confirm?” tag. Swipe right to accept, swipe left to dismiss, or open it and confirm. Nothing notifies them that one is waiting: they find it there, or in the recap card after a call. The empty state says what the design intends — “Aura will ask before adding anything to your life.”

What an item is A goal, a habit, a task — and five other kinds — with a category, an importance, and an optional due date. Once created, a student can edit the title and description, mark it done, snooze it, or cancel it into the archive; the date, type and category are fixed at creation. Cancelling takes an item off every list in the app for good — the row is kept on our side rather than erased, but there is no archive screen to go back to.

On the way out Dated items can leave as a standard calendar file — Profile → Privacy & account → Export life events (.ics). It is one way out only: Aura never reads a student’s calendar.

Reminders They live in their own tab, set either by asking Aura during a conversation or with the New Reminder button. They arrive as notifications the student’s own phone schedules — nothing is pushed from us — and can be snoozed by fifteen minutes, an hour or three. A reminder set out loud on a call is armed on the device the next time the app syncs: when the call ends, after the next reply, or on the next open.

No scoreboard There is no leaderboard, no comparison against other students, and no badge for a missed day. Aura is built against dependence rather than for engagement — nothing in the app rewards a student for opening it more often.

When she brings something up first Aura can raise something unprompted, but only after a student has opened the app — never as a push notification — and it is always dismissible. She is capped at one such message a day and four a week, and for the kinds she can measure, one that gets ignored twice stops coming.

And the design truth underneath: what collects here points out of the app — at the degree, the internship, the people. The calendar export exists precisely so the list can leave.

What she remembers — and what a student can do about it.

Being remembered is most of what makes Aura feel different from a chat window, so we made the memory visible rather than magic. Memory is one of the four tabs — not a settings page a student has to go looking for. It lists what she has saved, sorted into plain groups: people in your life, goals and dreams, preferences, what’s been weighing on you, wins and milestones, routines and habits, health, and other things. Each row is a short line, an importance mark and a relative date.

A student can search it, filter it to one person, and open any memory to see which conversation it came from — and jump back to that conversation. Nothing is capped and nothing is quietly evicted to make room. There is no counselor-facing version of this screen anywhere; it exists for the student and no one else.

Add, edit, forget A student can add a memory by hand, rewrite the wording, detail or importance of any memory Aura saved on her own, or tap Forget this memory. Forgetting removes it from everything Aura draws on straight away — chat and voice both — and moves it to a Deleted memories list where it can be restored for 30 days before it is purged on a nightly pass. Deleting the account is the unconditional version: conversations, memories, profile, gone.

Pinning Up to seven memories can be marked Always Remember This, and those stay in front of her on every chat turn and every call whatever is being discussed — with one exception, below: if the overnight pass has marked a pinned memory private, the cloud model gets only a note that a sensitive subject exists, not the words. It is a control over what stays in front of her, not a privacy setting.

Kept private Some memories carry a small Kept private lock — held on our own server and never sent to the cloud model. Aura’s overnight pass decides which ones, not the student; there is no control in the app for marking a memory sensitive yourself. And to be exact: that applies to the saved note, not to the message a student typed in the moment.

Incognito In a chat, a student can switch on Incognito and a banner stays above the composer until they switch it off. It means Aura extracts no memories from those messages, indexes nothing, and writes no summary of them. It does not mean they vanish — the messages are still stored and still appear in the student’s own History like any other conversation, and voice calls have no incognito mode at all.

Stop bringing that up Said in a conversation, typed or spoken, it stops Aura raising that subject on her own. It is not a block and it deletes nothing: if the student brings it up, she talks about it normally.

Your Sky Every three memories lights a star, and the stars fill one constellation at a time. It is drawn from a count of what she has saved, nothing more — not a score, not a measure of how a student is doing, and never compared to anyone else’s.

Aura is not counseling.

Aura is not counseling, not therapy, and not a crisis service, and she has not been clinically validated. When something concerning shows up in what a student writes or says, crisis lines — led by 988 — are shown alongside her reply rather than buried underneath it. She does not try to counsel a student through that moment: the app puts the helplines on screen beside her reply, and on a call she says the 988 number out loud herself.

A student’s conversations belong to the student.

• No ads, ever. Conversations are never sold, shared for marketing, or used to train models.
• Voice stays voice-only for moments. Live audio is processed under a zero-data-retention arrangement with our model provider; we keep the transcript of a call, never the recording.
• Students can leave whole. A student can delete their conversations and their account, and deletion means deletion. Account deletion is permanent — conversations, memories and profile — not a hide or a deactivate. Encrypted backups roll off within 14 days, and deleting a single conversation does not by itself remove notes Aura had already saved; those a student deletes separately, and they sit in a restorable folder for 30 days first.
• Aura is not a monitoring tool. No report about any student — no alerts, no dashboards, no flags — is ever sent to the institution. Students confide in Aura precisely because she isn’t watching them for someone else.
• One person can reach conversation content. Only Aura’s founder holds credentials that can — no one else at Vigyaan, and no one at any institution. He reviews conversations to check the quality of Aura’s replies and to verify the safety system, using truncated excerpts on an internal dashboard. Anything a student sends in Incognito mode is excluded entirely and never appears there. We would rather state this plainly than imply a wall of staff separation that does not exist at our size.

Built against dependence.

Aura sends nothing a student hasn’t asked for: the reminders they set, and optional daily check-ins they can retime or switch off entirely. Her own proactive messages are capped at one a day and four a week, and she stops sending a kind of message a student ignores twice. There is no leaderboard and no comparison to other students; a missed day never costs anything, and nothing resets to zero or scolds a gap. When a student says “stop bringing that up,” she stops. She encourages sleep, breaks, and real human connection — because a companion that’s doing its job makes itself less necessary over time, not more.

Adults only, verified at the door.

Aura is available to adults 18 and older. Accounts cannot be created with an under-18 date of birth, and the date can’t be edited afterward — which means students younger than 18, including early-admission freshmen, simply can’t use Aura yet. We think that’s the right trade.

What a pilot looks like.

We onboard a small number of campuses at a time, deliberately.

• Your side is light: awareness — a line in your student resource list — and honest feedback when we ask for it. No integration, no data exchange, no IT project.
• Our side: Aura’s core is free to every student for as long as they use it — unlimited text conversations, memory, and a monthly voice allowance, with the first month of the paid tier included automatically. Nothing about safety, privacy, or memory is ever behind a paywall.
• A direct line to the founder — questions from your staff, concerns about a specific behavior, a request to adjust something or to stop: one email, answered personally.