Can This App Help Preserve Your Family History?

In corporations, senior executives are often interviewed before they retire to capture institutional memory and retain vital lessons. Similarly, children and grandchildren often try (sometimes in vain) to get their loved ones to fill in the blanks of their lives before it’s too late to ask.

There are a number of ways to go about this, from flipping open the camera on your phone and pressing record to handing grandma a pen and some paper, but a number of services have emerged in recent years to help people ask the right questions of their loved ones and, hopefully, spark conversations about memories that would otherwise be lost to time.

One such service is Remento. It launched in September on iOS (Android coming soon) with $3 million in funding. It aims to make it easy to capture, store, and share family stories. As an Android user, I dug out my old iPod touch from my graveyard tech drawer and fired up Remento for a peek into the past. It offered an interesting way to catalog life’s big moments (and more obscure thoughts on life), but the UI needs some fine-tuning and the app might benefit from a virtual host who could help camera-shy users open up a bit. Here’s what to expect.

My Name Is Not Susan

Remento offers three login options: Continue with Apple, Google, or email. I chose Google, and when it didn’t recognize me as a user, Remento asked if I wanted to create an account. I agreed to the terms and was given the green light to proceed.

After a brief walkthrough of its features, Remento serves up an example project entitled “Susan” on the My Projects screen, with a photograph of an older woman (Susan, I presume) next to a sepia-toned snapshot of her decades ago on the right, playing an acoustic guitar. 

I tapped on Susan’s avatar and pressed play at the bottom of the screen. In an embedded thumbnail video overlaying the older snapshot, Susan offers a backstory on the image. Beneath the image are three text squares of prompts Susan had answered about the photo (“How did that experience make you feel?” What made this so memorable?” and “What might have made this experience even more memorable?”)

After four minutes of Susan’s backstory, I returned to the main screen, tapped the three-dot menu and selected Delete Project. It was time to take my own trip down memory lane.

Who Tells Your Story? 

To get started, tap the plus (+) sign button at the bottom right. On the next screen, choose from a set of prompts for yourself or the person you’ll be interviewing (parent, grandparent, sibling, partner, child, or anyone) or scroll to the bottom and start from scratch with questions or photos.

I was going to ask a family member to share memories for the purposes of this hands on, but they all live 6,000 miles away, and I thought holding up the iPod to a Google Meet session would be less than optimum in terms of conversational gambits, not to mention video/audio quality.

I have a professional mentor who is in their 80s now, a person of prestige with plenty of rich anecdotes. But they looked horrified when I asked, as if I’d said: “You might die any day now, could we record some of your stories?” (I did not, at least not out loud.)

Which is kind of the problem with these sorts of apps. You’re basically asking someone close to you to tell you their life story, against a background of their impending mortality. After COVID, we’re all somewhat sensitive around that subject, unsurprisingly.  

So I gave up looking for an interviewee, but opted not to pick the “Myself” option because that felt too weird. So I selected “Anyone” to see what the conversational prompts might be. 

Setting Up the Interview

Selecting “Anyone” as an interview subject gave me 10 sets of Prompts, including Record the Story Behind an Object; Reflect on Scrapbook Photos; and Capture this Moment. Some sets had a single question or prompt, while others had five or six.

I chose Record the Story Behind an Object because I was sitting at my desk surrounded by familiar objects, including favorite books, photographs in frames, and other miscellaneous items.

The next screen presented six potential prompts, which I could select or deselect. The process is not 100% intuitive. In order to upload a photo, the first prompt (an empty photo square above “What is this object?”) needs to be checked. Then you tap Use X of 6 Prompts down below, which delivers you to a screen where you can tap the photo icon to upload a photo or take a new one. It was a bit finicky for me, though, and didn’t accept the photo I’d selected.

Instead, I perused some of the other prompt options. Inside the project, I tapped the three-dot menu and selected Edit Prompts > Add Prompts > Questions from Library, which brought up 12 categories, segmented by life stage (childhood, teenage years, romance, parents, career etc) or major world events, like COVID-19.

The “Career” prompts felt like generic job interview questions (“What are the most important lessons you’ve learned from your career?”) while “Celebrations” veered off into therapy-level digging (“Are there traditions practiced by your family that you do not like?”) and “Self-reflection” had the traditional “What advice would you give your younger self?”

Nothing really appealed to me, so I picked “Where in the world are you most at peace?” just for the sake of this test and it added the prompt to my photo on the following screen. I was also given the option to add a question below the photo. 

Record the Story Behind an Object

The iOS permissions dialog box will request access to your microphone and camera so you can record videos. Do it in selfie mode to capture your own memories or flip to the rear-facing camera to record interviews with friends or family. 

Here’s where I got a little lost. My uploaded photo had seemingly disappeared, but the questions about the now-vanished object were pre-populated along the bottom of the screen. Then I found it with the question I’d typed in under the photograph as prompt seven, even though the entire recording was supposed to be about this object. Surely it should be present throughout the interview process? The final prompt was the “Where in the world are you most at peace?” question I’d selected above. 

I wanted to get on with the recording now, but the “Record Now” button was grayed-out and not functioning. When I clicked on it, a dialog box popped up encouraging me to edit my prompt and…add a photo. A little irritating, but for the purposes of this test, I laboriously deleted all the prompts except the one that showed up with my object shown and pressed “Record Now.” 

It gave me a 3, 2, 1 countdown. I talked for a minute or so about the object. The red line at the bottom of the screen showed me how much time was left. I clicked “Pause Recording” and then “Done for Now.”

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Playback and Export 

On the next screen, I had the option of Play, and everything seemed fine; the audio quality was good. I clicked the three-dot menu, and saw options including Export Recording, which was available with Video Only, Prompts with Audio Only, or Prompts with Video and Audio Overlay. I chose that last one.

It extracted the combined 35.6MB file, which was too big to send via Gmail, so I saved to my files locally on the iPod touch, and it appeared in my Albums where it played perfectly. Had I wanted to share it, then I’d need to upload it to the cloud and get a shareable link.

Why Not Incorporate AI?

Remento has a long way to go. The concept of the prompts is great, and you can tell thought has gone into their creation. I can see, after a few stops and starts, how one could do a decent interview with a beloved relative. But the video embed is too small; it’s basically a thumbnail. 

If you’re going to use this, I recommend watching a few of Remento’s promo videos on Vimeo to get a feel for the flow of the app first, as it’s not that intuitive. There are also creators on TikTok who give their verdict if you want to check those out, too. 

Not to be a downer, but not every family is full of happy memories. Yet difficult situations, trials, tribulations and so on are fascinating, and deserve to be recorded for posterity. However, and I speak from experience here, it’s not always possible to get grandparents to open up to grandchildren. 

For example, several of my (now late) family members had adventures of derring-do during WWII, and I tried to get them to talk to me about it. But Armed Forces personnel tend not to open up to civilians, especially if they’re related to them. 

Here’s where AI—specifically virtual humans—could step in to help. When I wrote about virtual humans who helped veterans prepare for job interviews, I learned how military veterans felt more comfortable talking about their combat experiences with an AI, which wouldn’t judge them. 

I think a future iteration of an app like Remento with a virtual human who draws out the memories from the interviewee would work very well. Especially if the AI builds up trust over time by encouraging the person to record a little each day. 

Then the underlying natural language processing and machine learning could extrapolate semantic meaning, apply tags, categorize, complete metadata fields seamlessly in the background, and deliver a cohesive story. Similar projects have been created for people living with dementia, via voice assistants, to prompt memory retrieval to keep the synapses firing. 

Many people now have at least a decade of memories poured into disparate social media accounts. I understand the value of encouraging intergenerational conversations, stored for posterity, via apps like Remento. But there must be a way to set an AI loose in the background to consistently catalog the highlights of a person’s life, and craft the narrative over time.