Talk to a real person, not an AI
You have spent enough evenings with a chatbot that agrees with everything and remembers nothing. It was easy, and it left you lonelier than it found you. You want a person: someone who can be surprised, disagree, and laugh at the wrong moment.
No AI personas, ever. Liveness and age are checked, so the other side is a person.
Every conversation on Lumi is between two people, or a few people in a room. There is no companion bot, no "practice partner" that is a model, and no scripted reply while you wait. The only software between you is the screening that looks for abuse, and it never speaks.
How it works
- Choose text, audio, or video. Camera-on is never required.
- Pass the selfie age check, once. A moment at your camera, read by software on Lumi's own servers and checked by a person. It is also a liveness check: a script cannot pass it. The photo is deleted the moment a person has reviewed the check, and after 90 days at the latest whatever happens.
- Talk to a human. Skip whenever you like; the next person is a few seconds away. If someone good comes along, wave at the end, and if they wave back within 7 days you are regulars.
The safety facts
- Every person you meet has passed the selfie age check. Users aged 13 to 17 are matched only with other teens; adults (18 and over) only with adults.
- The person you meet never sees your IP address: audio and video are relayed through Lumi's own servers.
- Lumi does not record your conversations. Automated screening on Lumi's own servers may sample camera frames and check text to catch abuse; what gets flagged is kept as evidence for 90 days and reviewed by a person, the rest is discarded.
- Skip or leave at any time. Report is one tap, and a person reads every report. Bans stick to the device and the connection, and a ban is never lifted for money.
- No account, no ads, no trackers, no data sale, and no third-party vendors.
What Lumi is not
Lumi is not a companion app. Nothing here is designed to keep you talking, and nobody on the other side is being paid to.
What the research says
A 2025 study by MIT Media Lab and OpenAI of nearly a thousand ChatGPT users over four weeks found that the heaviest users reported more loneliness and more emotional dependence, not less. Conversations with strangers work the other way round: commuters told to talk to the person next to them enjoyed the trip more than those who kept to themselves, and had predicted the opposite (Epley and Schroeder 2014).
Sources: MIT Media Lab and OpenAI, 2025; Epley and Schroeder, "Mistakenly seeking solitude," 2014.