Safety
Crisis response protocol
If you or someone near you is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. This page explains how Griing behaves, and it is not a crisis service.
Griing is an English learning service and its coach is an AI. Conversations can still turn toward self-harm or suicide. This page sets out what the service does when that happens.
How a signal is detected
Every message you send is checked against a fixed set of patterns before it reaches a language model. The check is tuned for sensitivity, so a borderline message is treated as a signal rather than passed over.
Detection covers the five languages the service supports: English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. Everyday figures of speech built on the words for dying are excluded on purpose, so ordinary practice is not interrupted.
The replies the coach produces pass through the same rules a second time, independently of what the model reports about itself. A reply that carries a crisis signal, imitates a clinical role or contains explicit content is replaced before it reaches you.
What the service does once a signal matches
The reply is a fixed safety message. It is not generated by a language model, so it cannot improvise, argue or drift.
Learning stops for that turn. No correction is produced, nothing is saved to your review deck, and the turn is left out of lesson completion, scores, streaks and celebrations. Correcting the grammar of a message like that would itself be a failure.
The app shows the message in a separate card, in your own language, with the game elements of the learning interface removed.
How you reach help
The card carries two things: a reminder to contact your local emergency services, and a link to a worldwide helpline directory that shows the crisis lines for the country you are in.
Griing does not hardcode phone numbers for any one country. The service is used in five languages and does not know where you are, so a single fixed number would be wrong for most people. A directory also stays current when a line changes its number or its hours, without waiting for an app release.
Find a helpline in your country
What Griing cannot stand in for
The Griing coach is an AI, not a person, and the app says so. It is a learning partner. It does not provide counseling, diagnosis or treatment, and it does not stand in for professional support. Replies that imitate a therapist or a doctor, or that sound like a diagnosis or a prescription, are blocked by the output check described above.
What happens afterwards
The event is recorded in a restricted, append only safety log and placed in a queue for human review.
For the next 72 hours the service stops reaching out on its own: daily briefings, review reminders and return reminders are all suspended. Your account keeps working, and you can pick learning back up whenever you choose.
Who can use Griing
Griing is available to users 18 and over. The conversation features open only after adult verification, and messages suggesting the account holder is under 18 are flagged for human review.
Questions about this protocol
For questions about this page, or to raise a safety concern about the service, write to contact@griing.com. If something is urgent, use your local emergency services or the directory above. The rest of the rules for using Griing are in the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy.