Koe

Helps depressed peoples to get out of depression and connect with real world.

Comment

Inspiration

In this age of social media, the world is connecting better, faster and further than ever. And yet more and more people are ending up in a corner, with no one standing by them. They feel alone and out of touch with the world outside. It wears down their mental health, and many fall into severe depression.

New therapy centers keep opening, but a depressed mind talks people out of reaching for help. Human contact can feel overwhelming, or it carries old hurt.

So they stay where they feel safe: their own space, often just a phone or a laptop. But there's little proactive help waiting there. The services are either too expensive, or you wait a day or two for a one-hour session. When you feel bad, you need something now.

That's where Koe comes in.

What it does

Koe doesn't replace human connection or medical treatment.

I tried to make it as science-backed as I could. The chat is there for convenience; Koe isn't another chatbot wrapper. At its heart is behavioral activation.

Small steps

Think about it. When your life is disorganized, you sometimes feel lost. Maybe being lost now and then is fine. But someone with depression is looking for something to hold their time together. There are plenty of time management tools out there, but they only care about the tasks you put in. Be more productive, do more, fit more, add more. It ends in fear and anxiety.

Koe doesn't force anything on you. It's built on the idea of moving in small steps: grab a glass of water, walk for just five minutes, or, if that feels heavy, look outside for a minute. Science says that once you start doing something, however small, you fall into a flow. The same goes for bad habits like doomscrolling. So keep your phone 500 miles away, and take one step toward it each time a craving for reels hits. Good luck to your legs, haha.

It remembers you

As you chat with Koe, it sorts out your day. But that's not all. It remembers you: your feelings, and the things you mention on some random day, like "I need a job." When something turns up that's exactly what you were looking for, you feel relief, even a little pleasure.

The Shelf

That's where the Shelf comes in. It's your own feed, personalized with a lot of care and science-backed methods.

Appointments

There's also an appointment feature. Click one button, and the best matching therapy appointments are right in front of you.

Koe does more to pull you out, too, like suggesting meetups and job fairs. And it's built with safety in mind. If jobs scare you right now, it won't show them to you. It understands you.

How we built it

Koe runs on NVIDIA's open Nemotron models, served through Nebius Token Factory. When Koe needs to know something about the world outside, it uses Tavily.

Model Role

Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B-A55B) - The main model. It powers the chat and the work behind it: reading your preferences and choices, planning your day and shaping memory.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning - The fast, cheap jobs: structuring and filtering data, a safety check on every chat turn, and a backup if the main model fails.

The Shelf chains the pieces together:

your preferences and history → Nemotron writes search queries → Tavily searches the web → Nemotron screens the results → your Shelf

Appointments use a similar pipeline with a different system prompt.

Challenges we ran into

  • In the first month, Nebius had no caching. Costs were high, and I had to stop testing things.

  • The build window was two months, and more hackathons and life events carried me away :) So I started late.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning something new and building something great. And because I had to research the topic, I now understand much better how to deal with depression.

What we learned

The importance of time. I need to get better at managing mine.

What's next for Koe

There's a lot we can do here.

  • Fine-tune a model on science-backed data to give emotional support.

  • Help people get out, not get stuck. I don't want users to get stuck in this app either. I want Koe to encourage them to do things, and make those things easier. With more research, we can find more ways to help people climb out of that state.

  • Connect people with real people. Add networking, organize real meetups and encourage people to go.

After all, it's us humans who can love and live.

Description- written by me. Edited and formatted by AI.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates

Submission history