Your personal biographer
Meet Rosie
Rosie interviews you about your life. You talk; she listens, remembers, and asks the next question - the one that comes from what you just said.
Who Rosie is
Rosie is the interviewer inside MyLifeMemoir. Her job is the one a professional biographer does: sit with you, ask about your life, notice what matters in your answer, and ask about that.
She is patient in a way an interviewer with a train to catch cannot be. She will wait while you find the year. She does not mind if you start in 1962, wander to 1978 and come back. She never sighs, never hurries you, and never makes you feel that you are taking too long - which is the single most common reason people stop telling a story halfway through.
Rosie is software. We say that plainly rather than pretending otherwise, because the reason she works is not that she is a person - it is that she is genuinely listening to your answer and building the next question out of it.
The difference
A questionnaire asks its next question. Rosie asks about yours.
The exchange below is the shape every MyLifeMemoir interview takes. Watch what happens at the third turn.
What was your father like when you were growing up?
Dad was a quiet man. He worked all the time. He served during the war, although he almost never talked about it…
You mentioned that your father rarely talked about the war. Do you remember the first time he ever told you something about it?
It was the night before my brother shipped out. They sat at the kitchen table until about two in the morning. I heard him say a name - Delacroix - and then he stopped.
Delacroix. Did you ever learn who he was?
No list of questions contains “Did you ever learn who Delacroix was?” That question exists only because of what the storyteller said thirty seconds earlier. It is the reason a conversation gets somewhere a form never will.
How Rosie works
She asks out loud, and you answer out loud
Rosie speaks each question aloud and shows it on screen in large type. You answer by talking. Your words appear as text while you speak - or, on an iPhone, a moment after you finish, which is a deliberate choice: iPhones cut live dictation off after a beat of silence, and a storyteller watching two words of a long sentence appear is a storyteller who stops telling it.
She remembers the people you mention
When you say a name, Rosie keeps it. Later questions use it: not “tell me about your sister” but the name you actually used for her. Names you have already explained do not get asked about again, and the spelling you gave is the spelling that appears in your memoir.
She drops questions you have already answered
Each section of the interview has written questions behind it. If your answer has already covered one - you described meeting your wife in seventh grade, and the next written question was going to be “how did you meet?” - Rosie removes it. The interview reads like somebody who was listening rather than a form working through its list.
She offers follow-ups; you choose
Her follow-up questions appear as cards you can tap. Rosie never barrels ahead and asks them automatically. If a question is one you would rather not answer today, you leave it alone and it is not part of your memoir. That control is deliberate: this is your story, and there are parts of every life that belong to the person who lived it.
What Rosie does not do
A page about an interviewer should be as clear about her limits as her abilities, so:
- She does not invent anything. Rosie writes from what you said. She does not fill gaps in your memory with a plausible detail, and she does not research your life or add facts you did not give her.
- She does not press. Every question is skippable, always, with no explanation. Nothing is required, and nothing is a test.
- She does not correct you. If your recollection of a date differs from the record, your recollection is what goes in. It is a memoir, not an encyclopaedia entry.
- She does not decide what is important. You review, edit and approve everything before it becomes part of your memoir.
- She is not a companion or a counsellor. Rosie is an interviewer. She is not there to keep you company between sessions, and she is not a substitute for talking to someone when a memory is hard.
About the “AI” part
Rosie uses speech recognition to turn your voice into text, and a language model to draft follow-up questions and shape your answers into readable chapters. We do not think that is the interesting part, and we do not build the product around it - but you should know what is under the hood, and you should know that your stories are never used to train AI models, by us or by anyone we send them to. That is an undertaking in our terms rather than a policy we could revise. The privacy page sets out exactly what happens to your words.
Questions people ask about Rosie
Do I have to talk to a computer?
You talk; Rosie asks. It works more like being interviewed than like using software. Most people forget the mechanics within a question or two - and if you would rather type an answer, you can do that instead at any point.
What if I ramble, or lose my thread?
Rambling is where the good material is. Rosie is built to follow a story that wanders, and the chapter you end up with is organised afterwards - so you never have to answer in the right order, or in complete sentences.
Can I stop in the middle?
Yes. Everything is saved as you go. A session can be five minutes or an hour, and you can come back to the same question a week later.
Does Rosie sound the same for everyone?
Her voice is one you choose from a small set. The questions, though, are yours alone - they are built from your answers, so no two interviews go the same way.
What happens to my recordings?
They stay in your account, private by default, and they can stay attached to your written chapters so your family can hear you tell the story. See privacy for the full detail.
What a session with Rosie is like
- As long or short as you likeTen minutes is a real session. So is an afternoon.
- Large type, spoken questionsDesigned to be read across a room and heard clearly.
- Nothing is requiredSkip any question, permanently or for today.
- Edit anything afterwardsEvery line of the transcript is yours to change.
Keep reading
Rosie is ready when you are.
Start with one question and see how far it goes.
30-day free trial. No credit card to begin.