Your dad has told that story a hundred times.
Nobody has ever written it down.
I send him a link. He taps it and talks, and the interviewer asks the follow-up questions you would ask yourself if you ever had the afternoon. You get a PDF book of his stories.
You keep meaning to ask.
You know the outline. He grew up somewhere you've only seen in photographs. There was a job before the job you remember. There's a story about a car, or a boat, or the night he met your mother, and you've heard three different versions of it.
You've thought about sitting him down with a recorder. Maybe you bought one of those books of questions, and it's in a drawer with the first two pages filled in. You do care. It's awkward, it takes hours, and there's never a good week for it.
Then one day the stories are secondhand, and you're the one telling them wrong.
Most of these send a prompt and wait. This one asks the next question.
The usual approach emails a question once a week and waits for someone to type an answer. That fails twice over. Plenty of people would far rather talk than write, and a question with no follow-up gets you a paragraph where there was an afternoon.
- A questionnaire asks
- “Tell us about your first job.”
- A good interviewer asks
- “You said you were terrified of the foreman. What was he like?”
That second question is the whole product. It's where the details live, the ones nobody thinks to volunteer because they don't seem important until somebody asks for them.
Three steps, and he never has to type a word.
You tell me who I'm talking to
Five minutes. Their name, roughly where and when they grew up, and anything you already want captured: the story about the car, the years nobody talks about, the question you’ve never asked.
They open a link and talk
I text the link to their mobile, once I’ve confirmed the number with you. They tap it, and the conversation starts. Nothing to install, no password, no typing. A sitting can run up to two hours, which is the voice service’s ceiling. There is no limit on how many sittings they have, so they come back whenever they want. If they wander off-topic, good. That’s usually the best material.
You get the book
I turn it into a proper book. Chapters, in their own words, with their own turns of phrase left in. Where something is unclear or half-remembered, the book says so instead of inventing a tidy version. You get it as a formatted PDF, ready to print, and the plain-text files as well. The more they talk, the bigger the book.
You keep all of it.
- A formatted PDF book – their stories in chapters, in their own voice, ready to print. I do not produce the physical book itself in this round. The file is yours to take to any printer.
- Audio recordings and printed books are coming – after cohort one. As a founding family, you will be first in line when those options arrive, and looked after.
- A searchable written record – plain-text files that sit on your own machine. There is no account to maintain and nothing to keep paying for. If I disappear tomorrow, you still have everything.
- Honest marks where memory is fuzzy – the book flags what was uncertain instead of writing over it. A record you can trust is worth more than a neat one.
The first six families
This is new, and I am running the first round myself, which is why it is six families. What going first buys you is the attention. I read every page before it reaches you, and you are dealing with me the whole way through.
AU$495 for the whole thing. Paid once.
Unlimited sittings, the PDF book, and the plain-text files.
Places in the first round are not open for booking here yet. Join the waitlist and I’ll write to you when they are. I open the round by hand.
One thing I'd rather you heard from me. The interviews are conducted by an AI interviewer. That is what makes unhurried, unlimited sittings affordable: a human oral historian charges by the recorded hour, and thousands of dollars for a finished project. The AI is genuinely good at listening and following up, and I review and edit all of it myself before any of it reaches you.
The things people ask first.
My mum would hate being interviewed by a computer.
Some people do, and that's a fair reason not to buy this. What usually happens is the opposite of what families expect. People are often more forthcoming, because there's no adult child in the room to perform for, no worry about boring anyone, and no clock. A lot of what is good in oral history comes from the listener having nowhere else to be.
If you're unsure, have them try once and stop there. I'd rather refund you than deliver something your family doesn't want.
What if they won't talk about certain things?
Then they don't. If something comes up that they'd clearly rather leave alone, the interviewer moves on, and they can decline anything, or ask at any point for something they've said to be left out of the book. This is a record of what someone chose to say.
Who owns the recordings and the text?
Your family does. You get a formatted PDF book and plain-text files you can keep anywhere, and there's no account you have to keep paying for to retain access.
Two things I'll be straight about. Your recordings are never sold, and never used to train a voice or a language model. What I read while editing is the transcript as it was spoken, names and all, because nothing strips it first, and what I learn from that work shapes how the interviewer and the book-making improve over time. And the conversation itself runs on an overseas voice service, so the recording is made there and stays there, outside Australia. What lands in the Sydney database is the transcript, and the editing step sends that transcript to a language model run by Anthropic in the United States. Your parent hears the same thing at the start of their first sitting, before anything is recorded.
How is this different from Storyworth?
Storyworth emails a written prompt each week and your parent types the answer. That works well for people who like writing. This is for the ones who don't. It's spoken, it asks follow-up questions instead of working through a fixed list, and there's no limit on how much they can tell you.
Is it too late if they're already unwell?
Often not, and it's usually the reason people finally book. Long-term memory tends to outlast recent memory by years, and shorter sittings are fine. Tell me the situation when you book and I'll be straight with you about whether it's worth doing.
What if I hate the result?
Full refund. Six families is a small enough number that I can afford to mean that.