# Yogi's Bliss — User Manual

*Pilot edition, August 2026. This manual is also what Yogi reads when you ask him questions before a session — if something isn't answered here, Yogi will say so honestly and point you to the right page on yogisbliss.com.*

## What Yogi's Bliss is

Yogi's Bliss is a voice-first yoga companion. You talk with **Yogi** — an AI guide trained on the holistic side of yoga: postures, breathing, and meditation — while your device's camera watches your movement and coaches you, out loud, in real time. You never need to touch the screen or watch it during practice. Yogi measures how your body actually moves, designs each session around your goal, your body, your mood, and your available time, and tracks your progress over weeks — so the practice evolves as you do.

## What Yogi can do

Yogi holds a natural conversation (you can interrupt him any time — he stops and listens). He measures your flexibility with the camera: forward fold, side-bend symmetry, overhead reach, squat depth, and free-form requests like "let's see how far my back bends backward." He designs sessions from five minutes to an hour, starts every practice with a short guided breathing exercise, coaches each posture by voice, counts your holds, and closes with a calm wind-down and a spoken summary. Where the camera truly sees a posture, he watches your shape as you hold it and offers a small pointer now and then — always toward your own measured range, never past it — and if you'd rather hold in silence, say **"just count for me"** and he simply keeps time. Your measurements and progress live on the **My Body** and **My Sessions** pages.

## What Yogi cannot do

Yogi is a movement and wellbeing guide, **not a medical professional**. He never diagnoses, never prescribes, and never pushes you past what he measured. If you mention things like chest pain, numbness, sharp constant pain, or recent surgery, Yogi will gently suggest speaking with a professional. Yoga complements medical care; it does not replace it.

He also can't see everything. On a single camera, standing poses can be genuinely checked for alignment; floor, lying-down and deep twisting poses can mostly only be *recognized and timed*. Where Yogi can't see well, he'll encourage and count rather than invent a correction he isn't sure of.

## How Yogi keeps you safe

**Say it and he stops.** During practice, if you say you feel **sharp pain, dizziness, numbness or tingling, or trouble breathing**, Yogi ends the session then and there. He won't offer a gentler version and carry on — those four signals mean stop, rest, and if it persists, see a clinician. About one in five people who practise yoga report some acute adverse effect, so this is a real rule, not a formality.

**Some poses are never offered.** Headstand, shoulderstand, plow, full wheel, deep lotus and the load-bearing arm balances (crow, crane, peacock) are excluded from unsupervised home practice altogether, whoever you are. They carry the highest documented injury rates — a headstand alone loads the head and neck with roughly 40–48% of your body weight.

**What you tell him is used.** When you mention something to work around — a knee, glaucoma, high blood pressure, pregnancy, osteoporosis, a disc problem — Yogi excludes the pose families that are unsafe for it, and quietly deprioritizes the ones that need care. With low-back pain he'll follow whichever direction eases it, and default to neutral-spine work when you're not sure, because forward-folding and back-arching protocols are opposites and the wrong one makes things worse.

## Does yoga actually work?

Honestly: the evidence is real, but modest — and we'd rather tell you that than oversell it.

- **Flexibility and balance.** The best-supported effects. In older adults, meta-analyses find meaningful gains in balance and smaller but real gains in flexibility and strength. Balance improves most.
- **Back pain.** Yoga helps chronic low-back pain about as much as ordinary stretching does — small improvements in pain and function, and the certainty of that evidence is low to moderate. One large review also found yoga *increased* minor adverse events compared with no exercise, which is part of why the stop rules above exist.
- **Mood, sleep, blood pressure.** Small-to-moderate improvements in anxiety, depression and sleep, and measurable blood-pressure reductions — but these are clearest when compared against doing nothing, not against active treatment or therapy. Yoga is not a substitute for treatment.
- **Everything else.** Claims about opening energy channels, detoxifying, or curing disease are **traditional heritage framing, not clinical fact**. Yogi will talk about them as tradition, and will never present them as medicine.

Change is slow: expect meaningful flexibility gains over **4–12 weeks** of regular practice, not days. That's why Yogi re-measures you every few weeks and advances postures only when your body has actually earned it.

## How a session works

**Your first visit:** Yogi introduces himself (about a minute), asks for camera and microphone access **once**, and invites your questions. Then you choose: **customize** (tell Yogi about yourself — how to address you, age, height, weight, any conditions, your yoga experience, your goal, your time) or a **general experience** (no personal questions — one gentle standard session, nothing saved). Customizing ends with a short camera check-up so Yogi learns how your body moves today.

**Returning visits:** Yogi greets you with your actual progress, asks how much time you have and whether anything's changed (that shoulder, your sleep), and offers: *"Would you like to skip the check-up and go straight to a yoga session?"* — he already knows your body from before and keeps learning from every posture you practice.

**No space for the camera to see all of you?** If Yogi can't see your whole body within about 20 seconds, he'll offer yoga that doesn't need it — like **chair yoga**. You can also just ask for chair yoga anytime.

## Free and Paid

**Free** runs entirely on your device with open-source technology — the camera analysis, Yogi's ears (speech recognition), and Yogi's voice all work locally, and with the offline download it needs no internet at all. **Paid** (during the pilot: invitation links with a personal code) adds the premium experience through secure API calls: Yogi's richest conversational intelligence, his signature voice, "measure anything" powered by generated analysis code, and your data synced so your progress follows you across devices.

## Your privacy, in one page

**Your video never leaves your device — and is never saved, not even on your device.** The camera's frames are converted on the spot into body-landmark numbers (joint positions); only those numbers are used, and only those results are kept.

What Yogi remembers: the profile you chose to share, your measurements, your session history, and — by default — your mood check-ins. **You are always in control:** say *"skip"* to any question, say *"don't save that"* to remove something, ask *"what do you remember about me?"* anytime. Free-tier data stays only on your device. Invited (Paid) guests' data also syncs securely to Yogi's Bliss servers under their invite code so it follows them across devices; the pilot also records, per invitation, a simple activity summary (sessions run, features used). You can request a full export or complete deletion at any time — see the Privacy page.

Please don't share sensitive identifiers with Yogi — no social security numbers, bank accounts, or card details. He will never ask for them.

## Offline mode

Choose **"Download Yogi for offline use"** and the app pre-downloads everything it needs (roughly 140 MB: movement model ~6 MB, speech recognition ~40 MB, Yogi's voice ~90 MB) into your browser. After that, the Free experience works with no internet connection — on a plane, in a basement studio, anywhere.

## Voice commands

You can simply talk — but these always work: **pause · resume · repeat · skip · my score · my body · my sessions · new session · end session · chair yoga · let's do the yoga** (moves from check-up to practice) · **just count for me / coach me again** (turn Yogi's posture pointers off or back on for this session) · **go ahead, Yogi / that's it** (hand him the turn early) · **don't save that / forget my mood from today** (data control) · **help** (Yogi lists what he can do right now).

## On iPhone

Open the link in Safari, tap **Share → Add to Home Screen**, and Yogi's Bliss installs like an app. On iPhone, Yogi may use Apple's built-in speech recognition and system voice — same intelligence, slightly different voice.

## Troubleshooting

**Yogi doesn't hear you:** watch the 👂 ears indicator — it glows while sound is being heard and flashes green when Yogi caught your words. No glow while you speak = check the microphone permission and that no other app holds the mic. **Yogi interrupts himself or misses you on speakers:** headphones make listening flawless; on speakers, keep the volume moderate. **Camera can't find you:** stand a couple of meters back in decent light — or accept the chair-yoga offer. **Yogi's voice sounds plain at first:** his true voice loads in the background on the first visit and takes over within a minute. **Still stuck?** The Device & Browser Help page covers every case.

## Learn more

On yogisbliss.com: **Getting Started · Privacy & Your Data · Safety & Medical Disclaimer · Plans · Offline Mode · Device & Browser Help · About & Contact.**