Questions

They don't have to be. You can set almost everything up for them. When it's time to record, they see one question at a time in large type. The question can be read aloud. They press one button and talk.

No typing, and no new app to learn. If they'd rather have you there, you can sit beside them and do it together.

No. They can record on their own, you can sit down and do it together, or you can make it part of a phone call.

Preservation's founder records with his father over the phone. Rather than only sending questions for him to answer alone, they go through some of them together, and the calls have turned into something worth having on their own. He hears stories he had never heard, asks the follow-up in the moment, and learns more about his dad now, not only for later.

Preservation isn't only something your family gets someday. The conversations can be part of what you get out of it.

That's what the questions are for. Preservation asks one at a time and follows whatever they actually seem interested in talking about.

It might start with childhood and end up at their first job, a terrible holiday, how they met your mother, the best decision they ever made, or the recipe nobody wrote down. They don't have to prepare anything, and they never have to tell their life from beginning to end.

You don't have to. Preservation comes with questions designed to get people talking, then uses what they've already shared to find the interesting thing to ask next.

You can also send your own question any time, including the ones you've been meaning to ask for years.

That's completely fine. A person's life is much bigger than their childhood.

They can talk about what they remember clearly, the people they've known, what they've learned, what they believe, what they regret, what they're proud of, what family was like, or what happened last week. There is no test, and nothing requires them to remember everything.

As much or as little as they want. One question over coffee, or an hour when they're in the mood. They can record every week, disappear for three months, and come back.

There isn't a finish line. The point isn't to complete their life story, it's to gradually preserve more of them.

No. Start with one conversation.

Photographs, letters, recipes, journals and other family materials can be added whenever you come across them. Adding an old photograph often gives Preservation something new to ask about.

Photographs, letters, recipes, journals, memoirs and documents. Video answers can also be recorded during a session.

Over time Preservation connects those things to the people, places and stories behind them, so they aren't just files sitting in a folder.

Very much so. A memoir preserves what someone chose to write down. Preservation lets your family keep exploring it.

Their writing sits alongside their recordings, photographs and other materials. You can ask about things buried inside it, find stories you didn't know were there, and work out what you still want to ask them while you can.

You should, and Preservation keeps the original recordings too. But saving something and being able to find it again are not the same thing.

Family memories used to disappear into boxes of cassettes, VHS tapes and DVDs. Now they disappear into a phone or a cloud account alongside thousands of other files. Think how many photographs are already on your own phone, and how rarely you go back through all of them.

Ten years from now your family is not going to watch thirty hours of old interviews hoping to stumble on the story they're looking for. With Preservation they can ask how their grandparents met, what their mother's first job was, why the family moved, or what their father thought made a good marriage, and be taken to what was actually said about it.

The goal isn't just to save more memories. It's to make sure someone can actually find them again.

A scrapbook lets you look through what someone left behind. Preservation lets you explore it.

A photograph can lead to the story behind the photograph. A name can lead to everything they've said about that person. A question from a grandchild years from now can surface a recording nobody would have thought to search for. The pieces become more useful because they're connected.

Yes. You don't need to wait until you're old, and you don't need to sit down and write an autobiography.

Answer a question when you feel like it. Add stories as they happen. Upload the things worth keeping. Over time you leave behind a great deal more than a folder of files.

Then they should speak it. Spanish and Urdu are available now. Choose their language when you set up the archive and every question is asked, and read aloud, in it. Follow-up questions come in it too, and Urdu turns the whole screen right to left.

Their recording and their words are kept exactly as spoken, never replaced by a translation. Some stories genuinely do come out differently in the language they were lived in.

Yes. You ask in English, your grandmother is asked the question in her own language and hears it read aloud in it, and she answers naturally in that language.

Her recording stays exactly as she said it. When the family asks the archive about it later, the answer comes back in the language they asked in, drawn from what she really said.

A language barrier shouldn't have to become a generation barrier.

No. Preservation is built around things the person actually said, wrote, recorded or preserved.

AI helps organize those things, understand a question, find the relevant material and suggest what to ask next. It does not invent a childhood memory because it sounds plausible, and it does not pretend someone said something they never said.

It says so. That distinction matters.

There are things someone told us, things other people remember about them, and things nobody ever thought to ask. Preservation shouldn't blur those together just to produce a satisfying answer.

Yes. When an answer comes from something they actually said, you can go back to the original recording or material behind it.

You shouldn't have to trust a summary of someone you love when their real words are right there.

Only if it is specifically allowed. The original recordings always stay exactly as they were recorded.

Any recreated voice or likeness is separate and optional, and is never required to build or use an archive.

Yes, and you decide who gets access. Family members can ask questions, suggest things to talk about, upload photographs and materials, identify people and contribute memories of their own.

That makes an archive much richer without one person having to do everything.

That's part of having a family. Preservation keeps track of where something came from rather than quietly merging everyone's memories into one official version.

Something your aunt remembers is her memory. Something your grandfather recorded is his. Future generations should be able to tell the difference.

The person who creates it decides who can view it, contribute to it or help manage it. The storyteller controls the choices about how their words, voice and likeness may be used.

Yes. You should be able to decide what belongs in your family's archive and what doesn't.

While Preservation is in testing, some kinds of deletion still mean contacting us, and we handle those personally.

Yes. Their photographs, letters, recordings, writing and other materials can become the foundation of an archive, and family members can contribute what they remember.

Preservation keeps those sources clear, so your grandchildren can tell the difference between something their grandfather actually said and something someone remembers him saying.

It stays with the family. Their voice, their stories and everything else you preserved are still there to explore, and the family can keep asking questions and adding their own memories.

The archive doesn't become something different because the person is gone. This is what you were preserving it for.

That's the idea. Instead of inheriting a folder of files they may never open, they inherit something they can explore.

They can ask where the family came from, what someone was like young, what they believed, what they got wrong, or something surprisingly specific that happens to matter to them at that moment. Sometimes they'll find things you never knew were there either.

They stay part of the archive, and you can go back to the originals and download them.

Preservation is meant to add something to your family's materials, not to replace them.

You don't lose what you've already preserved. Every recording, photograph, document, transcript and story stays readable, listenable and yours to download.

What stops is the living part: asking the archive questions and adding to it. A family shouldn't have to keep paying forever just to hold on to its own history.

One payment instead of renewing Preservation+ each year, and no subscription for your family to inherit later.

Your family can still export everything whenever they want, exactly as with any other plan.

Then your family's history should still be. You can export the original recordings, photographs, documents and writing at any time.

Preservation makes your family's history easier to keep and explore. It is never the only reason that history still exists.

Yes, and it is worth saying exactly what that means, because this is nothing like the internet most people picture.

This is not social media. Nothing is posted anywhere. Your archive does not appear on Google and cannot be found by searching. There is no feed, no profile and no public page. Nobody sees any of it unless you personally give them the link.

You also choose how much to say. Full names, places and dates all help the archive, and every one of them is optional. Someone can record a lifetime of stories and never state their surname.

And you can take it all back out whenever you want: the recordings, the photographs, the transcripts, all of it.

No. Search engines are not able to reach it, there is no directory of archives, and there is no page anyone can browse to.

Access works by invitation only. If you never send someone a link, that person has no way in.

No. Your private family archive is not used by Preservation to train public AI models, and it is not sold as advertising data.

Recording here does not put a person's stories into some large shared pool that anyone else can draw from. The archive is yours, it is separate, and it stays that way.

Yes. Some features, including transcription and answering questions from the archive, use outside AI services to process what is in it.

That is different from handing your family's materials over so another company can build a profile about your family or train publicly on your memories.