For families who’d rather hear the story than read it
A gentle, audio-first way to capture the stories your parents and grandparents have never quite been asked the right question about — then keep the recording, a transcript, and a typeset PDF you download. The voice stays in the app.
One large microphone button. No video. No typing. Works for the person who refuses to use computers.
How it works
Open the app, pick a question, talk for as long as feels natural. Three minutes or thirty. No prep, no script, no rehearsal.
Behind the scenes, the audio is turned into a clean transcript you can edit. The recording is yours too; you can listen back any time.
Every story stays as audio plus a transcript you can edit. When you’re ready, download a typeset PDF of the year — photos included. The voice stays in the app, where the family can listen.
Already in the app
A walkthrough that puts WisdomWeave on this phone — no app store, no typing. Open it together at the table. See how
Invite them in, or send one story as a link. They can listen, read the transcript, and reply — no account needed for a single story.
Mark any answer private and even the family you invited cannot hear it. The recording stays yours.
Weekly reminders fire only when a week has passed without a recording. Kinder than an email every Monday.
For the storyteller
Sixty years of research on “life review” shows that the act of telling your own story — out loud, warmly, with someone listening — lifts mood, eases regret, and brings the whole of a life into focus. It’s one of the most well-evidenced interventions in geriatric psychology.
You don’t have to be a writer. You just have to talk into the microphone, the way you always have.
For the family
You already have the photos. The cards. The Christmas videos. What you don’t have is the answers to the questions you keep meaning to ask — about the first job, the school friend, the bit of advice your dad never quite said out loud.
A year from now you’ll still have their voice, not a folder of emails.
The prompts
Not “list your achievements.” Not “describe your career.” Real questions, written by people who care how they land — three lines apiece, designed to spark a story, not a CV.
What did your childhood home sound like at dinner?
Voices, cutlery, the radio or TV, who sat where, what got argued about.
Looking back, what does that scene tell you about your family?
Was there someone in your life who really saw you, when other people didn't?
A teacher, a relative, a neighbour, a friend's parent — anyone whose attention changed something in you.
What did they see that you couldn't yet see in yourself?
Is there something you grew up believing that you've come to question?
Faith, politics, family rules, what makes a good life — any of it.
How did your thinking change, and what made it change?
If you could leave one sentence behind that someone might read fifty years from now, what would it say?
No pressure to be profound. The truest one is enough.
Why this one, and not another?
Ten chapters · 279 prompts · grab a free Father’s Day sample.
Privacy
Every recording is encrypted at rest. Audio files live in private storage; no public URLs. Only people you explicitly share with can listen. Mark any answer private and even they can’t. We will never use your recordings to train anyone else’s voice models — the only voice model we ever make is your own, after about thirty minutes of audio, and it stays inside your account. A short sample lives in the app; it is not a mailed audiobook. Stories marked Keep private are left out of it.
You can download a typeset PDF of every story from your profile. To close the account itself, write to us.
Read & research
A short selection from the writing — the science, the tactics, and the gift ideas worth your time.
White paper
Forty years of research on life review — Butler, Erikson, McAdams, Chochinov — in plain English. Why a well-designed question changes a life.
Guide
Five tactics that actually work for the reticent dad who won’t sit for an interview — ask about objects, follow the tangent, record before you ask.
Gifts
Twelve meaningful gift ideas for the parents who don’t need any more stuff — including the two free ones that are probably the best on the list.
Comparison
An honest, side-by-side comparison of the three serious life-story apps — written by us, fair to all three.
Free while we’re in early access. We’ll tell you before anything is charged, and nothing you have already recorded will be locked away.