Maya draws your thinking while you talk

Maya is a place to think out loud, with an AI on the other side keeping track. You say what happened or how you feel, in whatever order it comes out. Maya asks about it, and puts the parts that carry weight onto a map beside the chat.

The map is the reason Maya exists. A worry is rarely one thought. It's a handful that feed each other, plus the things you do to cope. In your head, or in a chat window, you only ever see one of them at a time. On a map you see all of them at once, and which one the rest hang from.

Every card is in your own words, and all of it is yours to edit: reword a card, move it, or delete it. You can also skip the chat and build a map by hand.

Here is a small one. Someone's friend has gone quiet, and they've spent two days deciding what that means.

Every map grows from a feeling at the top. Most of the cards under it are plain thoughts. The rest carry a label that says what kind of thing they are:

• Belief. A rule or conclusion that sits under several thoughts and gives them their weight.
• Question. Something worth asking of a thought, left open until you have an answer.
• Insight. Another way of seeing it that holds up. Maya can suggest one, but it only stays if you keep it.
• Urge. What the feeling is pushing you to do.
• Behavior. What you did, including things done in your head, like going over a conversation again.

The sorting does a job. An urge you haven't acted on needs something different from a habit you repeat every day, and a passing thought needs something different from a belief you've held for years. Once you can see which is which, it's usually clear where to start.

Maya is direct. It asks one question at a time. Once it can see the loop you're in, it says so plainly and suggests a way forward, and it stops asking questions. It doesn't pad its replies with sympathy phrases.

It also won't keep telling you everything is fine. Ask for the same reassurance a third time and Maya will point out that the asking has become part of the loop. That's less comfortable than being reassured, and more use.

You can type or speak, and you choose in Settings how long its replies are. With an account, Maya can remember things that help from one map to the next, like who the people in your life are. You can read those memories, delete them, or switch memory off.

A practice is a specific exercise for a specific kind of thought: checking the evidence for a prediction, running a small experiment, sorting what is up to you from what isn't. Maya takes you through one a step at a time, and what comes out of it goes on the map.

Practices are grouped into perspectives, the traditions they come from. There are 81 practices across 18 perspectives: therapies in use today, the early schools of psychotherapy, philosophy, and religious traditions. Each practice says where it comes from.

You decide which perspectives Maya draws on. You start with CBT and exposure therapy. Others, like Stoicism or Buddhism, you turn on yourself, and some of their practices open after a short lesson that explains the idea first. Maya only uses religious language if you do.

Not every practice suits every moment. Maya holds some back when they could make things worse, for instance when someone is grieving or feeling hopeless.

Browse the lessons

You can, and nobody else unless you share a map. A map is shared only when you make a link for it, and you can switch the link off again.

To write its replies, Maya sends your conversation to an AI provider, OpenAI, which doesn't use it to train its models. We don't sell what you write or use it for advertising. You can delete a map, clear your chats, or delete your account and everything in it from Settings. The privacy policy has the detail.

No. Maya is a tool for looking at your own thinking. It doesn't diagnose or treat anything, and no clinician is reading along.

It does sit well beside therapy. A map is a useful thing to bring to a session, and you can export one or share a link to it.

If you're in danger, or thinking about ending your life, Maya is the wrong place. Call your local emergency number, or in the US call or text 988. findahelpline.com lists free lines in other countries.

Maya is free while it's in beta. You can start on the home page without an account and send a handful of messages. A free account lets you carry on, and keeps your maps, including the one you started before signing up.