Nobody listens to nine hours
Raw recordings are unusable. Without an index, a transcript and a structure, they sit in a drawer - the audio equivalent of an unlabelled box of photographs.
Voice memoir
Don’t make them write it. Let them tell it, in their own words.
A photograph lets you see them. A memoir lets you know them.
What writing loses, and talking keeps
Ask somebody to write their life story and most of it never reaches the page. Not the facts - the facts survive. What does not survive is the way they would have put it if somebody had simply asked.
The family expression nobody else uses. The aside about the neighbour that turns out to be the best part. The detour into the story she has told a hundred times and still enjoys. Sitting at a desk, people tidy all of that away.
Talking keeps it. Rosie asks, the storyteller answers out loud, and the chapter is written from what they actually said, in their own words - which they can read back and correct.
What no page can hold is the sound itself: the accent, the laugh, the way your grandmother pronounced the town she was born in. MyLifeMemoir does not save the spoken answers as recordings you can play back, so if a sound matters, record it yourself as well.
After some topics, such as Traditions Worth Keeping, Rosie may invite the storyteller to record a short video for the family.
Why voice memoirs almost never got made
The technology was never the obstacle. Three other things were.
Formats die
Cassette, MiniDV, a proprietary app that went out of business. Families have lost more recordings to obsolete formats than to accidents.
Recording alone is awkward
Talking into a device with nobody asking anything produces about four minutes of material and a great deal of throat-clearing.
MyLifeMemoir answers all three. There is an interviewer, so there is something to answer. Every answer is attached to the question that prompted it and the written chapter it belongs to, so it can be found. And the whole memoir downloads in one file - the book as a PDF, every story - all in ordinary, widely used formats that are easy to copy and keep in more than one place.
What it is like to have one
A grandchild opens a chapter about a house on Ridge Street and reads her grandfather describe the coal scuttle going back down on the hearth - in the words he actually used, not somebody’s tidy summary of them.
How the writing happens
It happens automatically, because it is not a separate step. The storyteller is answering Rosie’s questions out loud, and the text is transcribed from that answer as they speak. There is no “now let’s write it up” - that session would never happen.
Sharing works the same way. The private link you send your family lets them read the memoir with no account and nothing to install, on whatever phone is nearest.
And it belongs to them
Their words are the storyteller’s. We never train AI models on them, which our terms bind us to. They are never made public, and never shared with anyone they have not chosen. Read the privacy commitment.
Keep reading
Keep the way they told it, in their own words.
It costs nothing extra. They were only ever talking.
$159 a year after a 30-day free trial. No credit card to start.