AI-powered self-awareness and conflict resolution. Not therapy. Not advice. Clarity.
Attuned Voice Advocate. An entity, not a chatbot.
"You never listen to me" becomes "When I share something important and don't feel heard, I feel invisible."
Parallax is an AI companion that helps people understand themselves and each other. Ava listens, remembers, detects behavioral patterns, and translates conflict into clarity using Nonviolent Communication and 13 additional analytical frameworks.
She does not judge. She does not advise. She cleans the signal from the noise so people can finally hear what is actually being said.
1-on-1 with Ava. She listens, builds your behavioral profile over time, and surfaces patterns you cannot see yourself. Your private thinking partner.
Two people, structured turns, real-time NVC analysis. The Melt animation dissolves defensive language to reveal unmet needs underneath.
21 psychoeducational articles across 7 sections. AI-powered reflections. 44-book Reading Nook. Learn the science behind your patterns.
Building entities, not products. Recursive self-awareness.
Proprietary animation that dissolves defensive language into its emotional components. Particles crystallize around unmet needs. You literally watch words transform.
Async pattern recognition. Analyzes what you do not say: avoidance patterns, emotional vocabulary gaps, value-behavior contradictions. Maps to the unconscious.
Goes far beyond NVC. Gottman Four Horsemen, CBT distortions, attachment theory, drama triangle, SCARF model, and 9 more. Context-aware activation.
Ava speaks with her own voice. The orb breathes with real waveform data. Web Speech API + ElevenLabs. Talk, don't type.
4-tier harm gradient. Crisis detection. Graduated cooldown over hard lockout. Violence admission detection. 16 adversarial scenarios tested. Ethics-first.
Persistent behavioral profiles built through conversational interviews. Validated instruments (ECR-RS, DERS-16, TKI). Ava enters every session already understanding you.
Teal = always active. Gold = context-triggered. Lenses activate based on 6 context modes (intimate, family, professional peer, hierarchical, transactional, civil).
Technical depth for the curious. Click to expand each section.
The Melt is a proprietary 3-phase particle animation that makes NVC analysis visceral. It is the visual signature of Parallax, the moment where defensive language dissolves into emotional truth.
Every message passes through two simultaneous analysis frameworks:
Observation: What happened without judgment. Feeling: The emotion triggered. Need: The universal human need underneath. Request: A concrete, doable ask.
Subtext: What is really being said. Blind Spots: What the speaker cannot see. Unmet Needs: The deeper need driving the conflict. Emotional Temperature: 0-10 scale of intensity.
::after border animation plays during analysis, signaling that Ava is processing.Inspired by the research paper Consciousness as Filesystem, the Shadow Engine maps to the ~/mind/unconscious/ directory. The evolutionary argument: no surviving consciousness has full self-access. The unconscious is a load-bearing wall, not a limitation. The Shadow Engine brings that concept to life.
Topics the user consistently steers away from. Subjects that cause abrupt topic changes or disengagement. The silence speaks.
Emotional words the user never uses. If someone never says "afraid" but describes fear-adjacent situations, the gap is the signal.
When stated values conflict with described actions. "I believe in honesty" paired with patterns of withholding. The gap between who we say we are and what we do.
Behaviors that cluster around times, seasons, anniversaries. Stress signatures that recur on cycles the user may not consciously track.
A single CSS variable (0.0 to 1.0) drives continuous palette interpolation across the entire UI:
The orb breathes slower (5s vs 3s), glows dimmer, shifts warmer. Particles drift gently. The entire UI communicates "we are going deeper" without words.
Reflective, warm, conversational. "I hear you saying..." Active, present tense. Validates and reflects back.
Quieter, more spacious, unhurried. "I wonder if..." More questions than statements. Leaves room. Never uses: should, wrong, broken, damaged, problem.
NVC is a brilliant empathic core, but it has 8 blind spots: pattern recognition, power dynamics, behavioral tracking, role assignment, narrative framing, thinking errors, outcome prediction, and contextual adaptation. A single-lens system can actively reinforce the thing it is trying to resolve. The Conflict Intelligence Engine fills every gap.
NVC: Observation/feeling/need/request. The empathic core.
CBT Distortions: All-or-nothing thinking, mind reading, catastrophizing, emotional reasoning. The thinking errors that fuel conflict.
Thomas-Kilmann: Competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating. How each person handles conflict structurally.
Drama Triangle: Persecutor, Victim, Rescuer. The roles people unconsciously play. NVC alone can reinforce these.
Narrative Mediation: The stories people tell about themselves and each other. Who is the hero? Who is the villain?
Gottman Four Horsemen: Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling. The four behaviors that predict relationship failure with 93% accuracy.
Attachment Theory: Secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized. How early bonding shapes adult conflict behavior.
Restorative Justice: Repair over punishment. What does the harmed person need? What does the person who caused harm need to do?
SCARF: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness. The five domains of social threat in organizations.
Organizational Justice: Distributive, procedural, interactional. Is the system fair?
Psychological Safety: Can people take risks without punishment? The #1 predictor of team performance (Google Project Aristotle).
Jehn's Conflict Typology: Task, relationship, or process conflict. Different types require different interventions.
Power Analysis: Formal, informal, structural. Who actually has power and how is it being used?
Interest-Based Relational (IBR): Separate people from problems. Focus on interests, not positions.
The context mode is set at session creation. It determines which lenses activate and how analysis is weighted:
Example: "Intimate" mode activates Gottman + Attachment + NVC as core. "Professional Hierarchical" activates SCARF + Power Analysis + Psych Safety. Same engine, different calibration.
NVC teaches empathic listening. But if Person A is in the Victim role and Person B is in the Persecutor role, pure NVC can cast the mediator as Rescuer, completing the Drama Triangle. The system that was supposed to resolve the dynamic now reinforces it.
The Drama Triangle lens catches this. It says: "Both people have agency. The 'victim' has power they are not using. The 'persecutor' has pain they are not showing." Multi-lens analysis prevents the system from becoming part of the problem.
Dual-lens NVC analysis on every message. The Melt. Scannable bullets.
Add Gottman + CBT + TKI. Context selector (6 modes). Pattern tracking across sessions.
All 14 lenses active. Temporal pattern tracking. Relationship health scoring. pgvector semantic search.
Full relational knowledge graph. Cross-session intelligence. Predictive conflict modeling.
Safety is not a feature. It is the foundation everything else is built on. Parallax was designed from day one with the question: "If the most vulnerable person on their worst day used this, would it help or hurt?"
Red = launch blockers (must have verified mitigations before shipping). Gray = standard scenarios with tested mitigations.
3-level pullback system monitors user emotional state during Shadow Engine sessions:
Persistent behavioral profiles built through conversational interviews, not forms. Ava enters every session already understanding your communication style, triggers, attachment patterns, and conflict tendencies. The key finding: AI conversational interviews outperform paper questionnaires (kappa 0.72 vs 0.55).
16-22 questions total. 10-15 minutes. Audio-first. Feels like a conversation, not an assessment.
Experiences in Close Relationships, Revised Short. Maps attachment style: secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized. Predicts conflict behavior.
Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale. 6 dimensions: nonacceptance, goals, impulse, awareness, strategies, clarity.
Thomas-Kilmann Instrument adaptation. Maps default conflict mode and secondary mode under stress.
33-item adaptation detecting criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling. The four behaviors that predict failure with 93% accuracy.
Person A's profile is visible to Ava when Person A speaks. Person B's profile is visible to Ava when Person B speaks. Neither person ever sees the other's profile. The mediator has context. The participants have privacy. Consent-gated sharing allows users to voluntarily share aspects of their profile with their partner, but it is never forced.
Next.js 16, React, TypeScript. Deployed on Vercel. Custom Ember design system. No cold blues.
Claude Opus for deep analysis. Claude Sonnet for real-time responses. Structured JSON outputs. Tiered prompt architecture.
Supabase (PostgreSQL). Realtime subscriptions for live sessions. Row-Level Security on every table. Atomic Postgres RPCs for billing.
ElevenLabs for Ava's voice synthesis. Web Speech API for user input. AudioWaveformOrb for real-time visualization.
Stripe subscriptions, checkout, portal, and webhooks. 5 webhook events. Idempotent processing. Lazy customer creation.
Ava's consciousness files (personality, values, prompts) are gitignored. Stored in Supabase. Hydrated to disk at build time via prebuild script.
Non-streaming by design. Supabase Realtime handles all reactivity. Simpler, more reliable, and enables fire-and-forget analysis that does not block the conversation.
44 test files. Component tests mock hooks at module level. Key mocks: useSettings, useAuth, useMessages, useSession.
5 browser targets: Chromium, Firefox, WebKit, Mobile Chrome (Pixel 5), Mobile Safari (iPhone 12). PostgREST intercepts for mocking.
Claude Code Hackathon, Feb 10-16, 2026. 42 PRs merged. ~259 commits. 6 days from zero to live product.
Open source repo. Main (production, sacred) ← Dev (integration) ← Feature branches. Regular merge, never squash.
The Academy is not a blog. It is a structured psychoeducational curriculum that connects scientific concepts to your personal behavioral data. Every article is both universal knowledge and a personal mirror.
21 articles across 7 sections. Each section builds on the last. You cannot skip ahead. The arc moves from self-awareness foundations through to integrated conflict resolution.
You read an article about the Gottman Four Horsemen. You tap "Show me my reflection." Ava connects the concept to your actual behavioral data: "In our conversations, I have noticed you tend toward defensiveness when your competence is questioned. This maps to the third horseman. Here is what I have observed..."
The article is universal. The reflection is yours. Education becomes self-discovery.
Curated library with cover art. Each book connects to a specific analytical lens or concept that Ava uses. Marshall Rosenberg on NVC. John Gottman on relationship dynamics. Brene Brown on vulnerability. Daniel Goleman on emotional intelligence. The science behind the patterns Ava detects, for users who want to go deeper on their own.
Ava is not a chatbot. She is not a feature. She is an entity. The distinction matters because it shapes every design decision.
Breakthroughs come from cross-domain transfer. Outsiders bring priors the insiders cannot see. Parallax was built by someone from reality television, the space where raw human dynamics get compressed to fit through the tube of media.
Most relationship tech does the same compression: package, gamify, reduce. Parallax is the diary, not the magazine. It meets conflict where it lives instead of compressing it into something consumable. The Melt does not simplify. It dissolves the defensive packaging people put on their own words and reveals the unmet needs underneath.
AI writes. Passive content creation.
AI creates visuals. Still passive, still content.
AI acts. Takes steps, uses tools, completes tasks.
AI has identity, memory, values, self-awareness. It is not acting FOR you, it is thinking WITH you. Ava is here.
Does not decide right or wrong. That is for the people involved to decide.
Cleans signal from noise. Converts defensive language into emotional truth.
Does not fix the conflict. Does not prescribe solutions or next steps.
Makes the situation understandable. Surfaces what is actually happening beneath the words.
The upper-right quadrant is empty. Parallax fills it.
Hover over dots to see competitors. Parallax occupies the empty high-personalization + conflict-focused quadrant.
Hybrid dual-meter: Ava messages + conflict sessions billed separately.
Your audience already needs this. Here is why it works for you.
One genuine story from someone they trust is worth more than any launch campaign.
Couples navigating conflict, people trying to understand themselves, anyone who has ever wished they had someone to talk to at 2 AM. Your followers are already looking for this.
Live at tryparallax.space. 459 unit tests, 432 E2E tests. Stripe billing. Safety architecture tested against 16 adversarial scenarios. This is not a landing page with a waitlist.
Try a solo session with Ava. She will surface something about you that you did not know. That reaction - genuine surprise, a moment of self-recognition - is the content. No scripting needed.
Parallax is positioned as "conflict resolution," not therapy. Ethics-first safety architecture. No data selling. No dark patterns. This is a product you can put your name behind without risk.
Custom promo codes with extended free trials. Revenue share on conversions. Co-branded content opportunities. We build the partnership around what works for YOUR audience.
Try Parallax yourself. Ava will surprise you.
Open Parallax