Sunny is not an emergency service. In an emergency, call 911.
If your family member says something worrying to Sunny, Sunny does one job: it tells their family right away, and offers to call them. Sunny never gives medical advice, never counsels, and never calls 911, and it says so plainly.
Sunny reacts to a short, fixed list of clear phrases, things like "hurt myself", "I want to die", or "call 911". This list is built into the app. Sunny does not guess at feelings, score moods, or judge someone's mental state. It matches words, nothing more.
It depends on where the person is in their journey, and we want to be plain about both the decision and the reason it changed.
In the earlier stages, the 988 line appears on their own screen. Someone in the early stages can read a number and dial it, and, this is the part that matters most, they may not have a caregiver at all. A person can set Sunny up for themselves, with nobody else in their circle. Routing every crisis referral to "the family" quietly assumes a family is there to receive it. For someone using Sunny alone, that would mean the referral reached nobody. So below that point the line is on their screen, quietly and in full: "You can talk to someone any time. Call or text 988. For an emergency, call 911."
It is deliberately short, and it deliberately does not name what it is responding to. Someone reading it is already distressed; the words that name the state are the ones most likely to deepen it, and none of them are needed to dial a number. It sits in ordinary weight rather than bold, at the same size as everything else on the screen: present, not alarming.
In the middle and later stages, it goes to the family's screen instead. Sunny is built for people whose memory and understanding are changing. Someone at those stages usually cannot dial a number they have just read, or hold onto it long enough to use it. A hotline panel appearing suddenly, in a moment when they are already distressed, is far more likely to frighten and confuse them than to help. There, putting it on their screen would be a gesture at safety rather than the real thing, so we put it where somebody can act on it. The caregiver is a user of Sunny too, with their own account, and they are the person who can pick up a phone. What the person themselves sees stays deliberately quiet: a still line saying Sunny is not an emergency service and that in an emergency the number is 911.
What does not change at any stage: the line is silent and Sunny never speaks it. Sunny's voice stays warm, and stays on family. Showing someone a number is not the same as counselling them, and Sunny does not counsel.
We count these moments so we can report how often a crisis referral was made, without recording anything about the person.
The alert to the family is saved in your family's own record, so the care circle can see it was sent. Sunny does not write down any label about the person's mood or state of mind. Not in these moments, not ever.
Write to us at care@bytewise.ai. A real person reads it.