Safe Telegram assistant for teenage psychological support
About the initiative Virtual Friend Selia
The Ivan Franko International Fund is a non-governmental charitable organization supporting Ukrainian studies, humanities and the popularization of Ivan Franko’s legacy. The initiative needed a safe digital format for sensitive communication with teenagers.
Challenge: safe support for teenagers
Create a virtual assistant for teenagers that helps them work through psychological challenges and includes:
- A flexible dialogue tree prepared by psychologists
- Video responses with Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka characters
- A friendly content style for a teenage audience
- Protection of sensitive data and conversation privacy
- An admin panel for managing topics and scenarios
Solution: scripted Telegram assistant
We built an open Telegram bot that communicates as Virtual Friend Selia using text, buttons, videos and animated stickers. For the back office, we created a system for managing topics, dialogue fragments and relationships between them.
Assistant architecture
Chatbot type:
Platforms:
Telegram assistant for teenagers
At the beginning of the conversation, users provide name, gender and age, which influence the following response scenarios.
The main menu contains topics and dialogue trees prepared by psychologists.
Responses are delivered as text, stickers, images and videos with professional actors portraying Ukrainian cultural figures.
Conversation history can be cleared at the user’s request or automatically after the session ends.
Scenario management panel
A protected admin panel manages content, statistics and complex transition logic between conversation fragments.
Topics can be created, edited, sorted, deleted and connected to a specific character.
Each fragment can include text, images, stickers, videos, buttons, delays and response conditions.
The system supports links from one fragment to many previous and next dialogue branches.
The admin panel provides depersonalized audience analytics and topic popularity by age categories.
Assistant functionality
1
Personalized Telegram assistant with a friendly teen-focused interface
2
Two characters and 17 important psychological topics
3
700+ connected conversation fragments
4
Text, stickers, images, videos and controlled response scenarios
5
Automatic history cleanup for privacy protection
6
Flexible admin panel for topics, fragments and transitions
7
Depersonalized analytics on audience and content popularity
