Not because we didn't care. Because asking felt like a project — sit down, set up a camera, be serious about it — and the project never got scheduled. Meanwhile, in the car on the way to the airport, one of them would mention something extraordinary in passing, and it would be gone by the next exit.
So the first version was selfish and small: something that would ride along on those drives and ask them the questions we kept meaning to ask. What it recorded in the first week was better than anything a decade of good intentions had produced.
What we believe
The keepsake is never cut
We record continuously and keep everything — the pauses, the false starts, the laughing, the moment a voice breaks. Those are not imperfections to be edited out. They're the person.
Nothing to learn
An 82-year-old should not have to make an account, remember a password, or be taught an app by their children. Six letters, spoken questions, big print. If it needs explaining, we designed it wrong.
Dig, don't survey
Anyone can ask where you were born. It takes attention to ask what you were afraid of that year. We'd rather have three real stories than thirty tidy facts.
Kept for good
Losing a family's recordings is the one failure we'd never forgive ourselves. Everything is copied off-site the moment it's recorded, and you can download all of it, any time, forever.
About the AI, plainly
We use AI, and we'd rather say exactly how, because in a product about authenticity that distinction is everything.
The AI asks the questions. It listens to each answer and decides what to ask next — that's what makes it feel like a biographer rather than a form, and it's why it can do this patiently, hour after hour, without getting tired or awkward.
The AI does not invent the story. Not a scene, not a detail, not a sentiment. The words are theirs, the memories are theirs, and the recordings are the proof. Where the book paraphrases for readability, it's built strictly from what was actually said — and your family reads and corrects it before anything is printed.
Why it costs $500
Because it's a book and a permanent archive, not a subscription with a monthly reminder to feel guilty about. A ghostwritten memoir starts around ten thousand dollars and requires a person who's willing to sit for formal interviews. This is a fraction of that, for someone who would never sit for them at all.
It's one payment. If the first conversations don't move you, we refund it entirely — no forms, no argument.
What we're not
We're not a social network, and none of this is public. We don't advertise against your family's memories. The archive belongs to the family that made it — for the book, for whatever they want made from it later, and for them to do with as they choose.