There's a moment I think about often. I was sitting with my grandmother, recording her voice on my phone — not because I had a plan, but because I was afraid of losing her. Not just losing her, but losing the sound of her laugh. The way she paused before telling a story. The warmth in her voice when she said my name.
I realized something in that moment: we spend so much time and money preserving photographs and documents, but the thing we treasure most — someone's voice, their presence, the cadence of their speech — is the hardest to hold onto.
That's when I started wondering. What if there was a tool that did for voices what cameras did for faces? Not just recording, but preserving — with intention, with care, with structure. Something that made it natural and easy for people to tell their stories.
I went deep into the research coming out of UCLA, UNM, NIH, and Northwestern. I learned about cognitive interviews, life review therapy, motivational interviewing, narrative identity — and eventually, the critical importance of memory integrity and safety in AI-mediated conversations. Those four came from very different places: police interviews of witnesses, work with older adults, counseling, and the psychology of life stories. None of them was made for a family memoir.
What if we combined them? What if we built something that felt like talking to someone who truly listened?
That became Echoes: an iPhone app that guides someone you love through their life story in conversation, and keeps it in their own voice.
