Biographer began with my parents.

We built the first version of Biographer for my parents.

My mom would always tell me about how she once sat down with her mother for a day and recorded her answering questions about her life. She described it as one of the most meaningful things she did. One day my mom showed me a 15 page transcript of that interview. I digitized the transcript and started to create things out of it: beautifully written chapters in the style of a professional memoir writer, children's books for my kids, podcasts, and even songs.

I realized a couple of things: if used correctly, AI can be the most patient interviewer on the planet and deeply inquisitive. It can do things even most professional memoir writers cannot, and for a fraction of the cost. And that people's life stories can become so much more than a conventional book.

So I teamed up with my friends and colleagues from my previous company, and we started to build something special. A patient interviewer that could sit with my parents, ask the questions I never thought to ask, and turn their answers into chapters in their own words and in their own voice and so much more.

I got both my parents using it and they fell in love with the experience. My dad had a fatal illness, and I was grateful that he was able to use The Biographer before he passed away. We captured his stories while he was here to tell them. Not a summary, not my version of them, but his telling. His phrasing. The details only he knew. His voice. I even built a playlist out of the songs he talked about that were meaningful to him throughout his life. We listened to it in the hospital together.

That is the entire reason Biographer exists now. So a daughter can finally ask her father the question she's been carrying. So grandchildren and great grandchildren who never got to meet someone can still hear the way he told a story. So no one has to stand at a service wishing they'd recorded just one more afternoon.

We're a small team. We have worked together for over a decade and built consumer products that have touched the lives of tens of millions of people. We believe that technology can be a force for good, and more importantly, has the power to bring people closer together when built thoughtfully and used well.

There's a lot of apprehension about AI these days. Much of it is warranted. We think this is a terrific application of the technology. We find ourselves doing things that haven't been done before: turning life stories into songs, creating children's books for our kids, generating audio bedtime stories told in our parents' voices, making the stories of our parents and loved ones come to life in ways that were unimaginable before. We love building this product because we get to build it for ourselves and the people we care about most.

We're also building this for everyone who has someone whose story is worth keeping — which is to say, everyone. Start with the people you love most. Please don't wait the way most of us do.

— Jared