Narwello
Friendship starts with hello.
A daily friendship-skills app for neurodivergent tweens. Eight weeks of short lessons and small real-life quests, with Ellie the narwhal — a coach you talk to out loud, hands-free, with nothing to hold and nothing to press.
- Ages 10–15, with or without a diagnosis
- English and Russian, both complete
- Android first, iOS from the same code
The problem
She wants friends. Nobody ever taught her the moves.
A twelve-year-old stands at the edge of the group at break. She is not uninterested and she is not fine on her own — she wants to be in there. She just does not know the moves: how to start, what to say second, how to join a conversation that is already running, what to do when she says something and nothing comes back.
The advice she gets is “just be yourself” and “just go and talk to them”. Neither of those is a step. And the books that do contain the steps — Dale Carnegie’s, for one — are three hundred pages of adult prose. No tween is going to read them.
The skills themselves are teachable, and they are taught: one at a time, concretely, in evidence-based social-skills programmes for autistic teens. Those programmes are groups, in clinics, in one city, in one language, on a waiting list, at a price.
Narwello takes the same material and turns it into a five-minute habit on a phone — in her own language, at home, at her own pace, on the days she has the energy for it.
“Just be yourself” is not a step.
The daily loop
Five steps, every day, in the same order
Predictability beats delight. Nothing is timed, nothing counts down, and no step blocks the next one — the lesson is recommended, not a gate.
A lesson, 3 to 5 minutes
One idea per card: what the skill is, a short example dialogue, a “why this matters” story, and one thing to remember. Swipe through and you are done. No quiz, no score, no timer.
Three quests for the day
Small, concrete, real-life: “use one person’s name in a greeting”, “ask three classmates what they watched”, “give two specific compliments”. Every single quest ships with a comfort-mode version — the same skill with less exposure — and comfort mode earns exactly the same points.
An evening check-in
How did it go, what happened, how did you feel. Five mood tiles and a box for her own words. “Nothing came back” is a valid, logged, complete answer — the quest still counts.
Points, streak, level
Points for what she actually did and a streak for showing up. A missed day does not delete the programme: day 9 waits until she gets there. There is no leaderboard and nobody to lose to.
An avatar and a room
Points are spent on clothes, hair and accessories for her avatar, and on furniture, plants and wallpaper for her room. 80 avatar items and 50 room items, all drawn as flat vector art in the app’s own palette.
The coach
Ellie, and the part where you just talk
Ellie is a narwhal — an older-sister figure, not a teacher and not a therapist. She is the coach: text chat when the child wants to type, and a live hands-free conversation when she wants to talk. The live conversation is the headline feature of the whole app.
The three states, and the words that go with them
The mic is open and the tusk glows steadily, brightening with her voice. Nothing has to be pressed for this to be true.
Just talk. Nothing to press.
The only two controls on the screen are Mute and End.
Live means live. The microphone opens when the conversation starts and stays open until the child ends it. She talks, Ellie answers, and she can cut in mid-sentence — Ellie stops and listens, the way a person does. Speaking is a thing you do with your voice, not with your thumb.
The state of the conversation is always carried by three things at once: Ellie’s face, the glow on her tusk, and words on the screen. Colour is never the only signal, so it still works if you are colour-blind or not looking at the mascot.
What the voice mode deliberately does not have
- No push-to-talk and no hold-to-talk.
- No “tap to speak” and no waveform to press.
- No microphone button anywhere in the coach — a mic glyph in thumb reach is the most familiar push-to-talk affordance there is, and a child who taps it goes silent mid-sentence without knowing why.
How the round trip is built
- The phone streams audio continuously to the backend over one WebSocket.
- A live speech-to-text stream turns it into words and signals when she has finished a sentence.
- The transcript, plus today’s lesson and quests, goes to the language model.
- The reply is split into sentences and each one is spoken back as soon as it is synthesised, so the answer starts before it is finished.
Speech recognition is Deepgram, the voice is ElevenLabs, and the answer comes from Claude through a private gateway. The pieces are chosen and the speech round trip has been verified in a standalone test; the app that runs it is still being built.
Parents
One report a day — and the child is told first, in her own words
The parent report is the part of this app that is easiest to get wrong. Narwello’s answer is that nothing about it is a secret from the child.
What the daily email contains
- Which lesson she did, which quests she completed or skipped, her points and her streak.
- The words she wrote herself in her quest notes and check-in, verbatim — because she is told, on the screen where she writes them, that a parent reads them exactly as written.
- A short paraphrase of what came up with Ellie: the themes, what went well, what was hard, and one concrete thing you could try tonight.
What it never contains
- Not the conversation. Not the transcript, not her messages, not Ellie’s replies.
- Not the audio. Voice goes straight to text and the recording is not kept.
- No location, no contacts, no screen time, no “what she was doing at 4pm”.
The one exception, and it is not a loophole
If she tells Ellie that someone is hurting her, that she wants to hurt herself, or that teasing has become bullying, the parent is emailed straight away — with a short excerpt, what Ellie said back, and what to do next. That exception is written on the screen the child reads before her very first conversation.
Word for word, what she is shown before she can talk to Ellie
- “You can talk to me about anything at school or with friends.”
- “Once a day I send your parent a short summary: what we worked on and how it went.”
- “I never send the whole chat. Not your words, not the recording.”
- “The words you write after a quest, your parent reads exactly as you wrote them. Our chat, they never see.”
- “If you tell me someone is hurting you or you want to hurt yourself, I tell your parent right away, so they can help.”
Transparency, never secret surveillance.
The method
Where the material comes from
Nothing in the curriculum is invented advice. Every day maps to a named principle from a published source, and the map is in the repository.
Dale Carnegie, rewritten for a twelve-year-old
Genuine interest in other people, smiling, remembering and using names, listening, talking in terms of the other person’s interests, making people feel important sincerely, avoiding pointless arguments, admitting mistakes fast, seeing the other side, encouragement. Same principles, teen examples, one per day.
UCLA PEERS skills
PEERS is the best-evidenced social-skills curriculum for autistic teens, and it is concrete where Carnegie is philosophical. Narwello uses its moves: trading information, finding common interests, the five-step way into a group conversation, exiting kindly, handling teasing, handling disagreements, being a good sport, choosing friends who fit, planning a get-together.
Neurodiversity-affirming, throughout
Skills are tools, not a personality transplant. Eye contact is never demanded — the eyebrow trick is taught as fully valid, and deciding it is not for you is a stated valid result. Stims, fidgets and breaks are self-care. Masking is named as exhausting and is explicitly not the goal. Special interests are the bridge to friendship, not a habit to manage.
And the supporting tools
Light CBT for social worry (thoughts are not facts, brave-steps ladders, a coping card), social stories, self-advocacy scripts, and sensory self-care with a break signal agreed with a parent in week one.
What Narwello is not
- It is not therapy and not a substitute for it. If a child needs a clinician, she needs a clinician.
- It is not a medical device. It does not diagnose, screen, treat or claim to treat anything.
- It has not been clinically validated. It is built on published material; that is not the same as evidence for this app, and we will not pretend otherwise.
- It does not coach romantic relationships, and it never will. Every example is same-age friendship.
Where it sits
Not a chatbot, not a companion, not a course for therapists
There are AI coaches you can talk to, AI companions kids already talk to, and social-skills curricula sold to clinics. Narwello is deliberately none of those three, and here is where the line is drawn each time.
An AI social-skills coach
Open the app, describe a situation, get advice or a role-play. Useful in the moment, and over when you close it.
A programme with a coach inside it
Eight weeks of daily lessons and real-life quests give Ellie something to coach about. She knows today’s lesson and uses its words. The practice happens with real people at school; Ellie is the bridge, not the destination.
An AI companion
A friend-shaped chatbot that is always there, always agreeable, and built to keep the conversation going. Many autistic teens already use one, and the early research on what that does to loneliness is not reassuring.
Transparent, and pointed outward
The child is told, before her first message, that a summary goes to her parent. The parent sees summaries and never transcripts. Every quest sends her towards a real person, and nothing in the app is designed to keep her talking to Ellie longer.
A curriculum for therapists
The best social-skills material for autistic teens is real and published — and delivered as clinic groups with waitlists, or as video libraries sold to schools and practices.
For the child, at home, in her language
The same published sources — Carnegie for teens, the UCLA PEERS skills, social stories, light CBT — reworked into two to four minutes a day that a twelve-year-old opens herself. English or Russian. No clinician, classroom or waitlist required.
The interface
What it looks like
These are the real screens from the UX specification in this repository, drawn here as HTML in the app’s own palette — not photographs, not app-store renders, and not screenshots of something that ships tomorrow.
Today
Tuesday, 8 September
Week 2 · Day 2
Remember names
about 3 minutes
Quests for today
- Use one person’s name in a greeting1 / 1
- Ask 3 classmates about a movie1 / 3
- Say hello to someone newdone +20
Evening check-in
How did today go?
4 days in a row
I’m listening
Just talk. Nothing to press.
What we said
- Ellie · That sounds like it stung.
- You · she didn’t even look at me
Tuesday, 8 September
Report
This is exactly what the email contains.
At a glance
Lesson
Day 9 ✓
Quests
2 of 3
Points
+85
Streak
5 days
Quests
✓ Ask 3 classmates about a movie · comfort mode
Her note: “Asked one person, she likes the same show.”
– Say hello to someone new · skipped today
What Ellie noticed
She started a conversation today without being prompted, and it went better than she expected. Being left out at lunch came up twice.
You could try tonight
Ask about lunch. Two minutes, no advice.
You see summaries, never the conversation itself. She knows this.
Made for one child first
Narwello started because one parent read Carnegie at twelve and watched his autistic daughter want exactly the same thing without a way in. Everything in it is built to be the thing she would actually open on a Tuesday evening — short, kind, predictable, and never once ashamed of her.
Want to know when it opens?
There is no signup, no beta and no store listing yet. When there is, you will get exactly one email about it.
Or write to us directly: oleksandr@netzet.com