From my Mom’s voice recordings to a compelling story in her authentic style

“I want to share stories about my grandmother with you and your kids.” Now in her 80s, with eyesight gradually declining, that simple sentence changed how I think about preserving family stories. When I asked why, she replied, “Because neither you nor they know what life was like back then.” Her grandmother was born around 1890, during the Qing Dynasty, and held incredibly strict expectations for the girls in the family — rules about posture, speech, behavior, and even whether they could receive an education. My mom believes these stories would fascinate my kids — and even my generation — because they reveal just how much the world has changed. And she’s right. These aren’t just stories about manners; they’re about history, culture, and the lived experiences of women navigating a world we can hardly picture now. But with her vision problems, typing has become a challenge. I realized that if we didn’t capture these memories soon, they might be lost forever. I told her, “No worries. Just record your stories piece by piece and send them to me as voice messages.” I saved the audio files, transformed them into narratives using LivesToTell, and sent both the recordings and the written stories back to her. She was thrilled. She said the app had captured exactly what she wanted to express — even though, like any natural storytelling around the dinner table, her words sometimes wandered, repeated, or fell out of order. Yet the app transformed her voice notes into clear, heartfelt narratives in her authentic style — not a robotic one. That moment reaffirmed my purpose: to make it effortless for people to preserve their memories, and to carry forward the richness of our culture and history for future generations.

Preserving a Family Legacy Across Generations

When my mom passed away a few years ago, I reconnected with my extended family to honor her legacy. One of my older cousins began sharing family stories — tales my mom had rarely spoken of. I uncovered gripping stories about where we came from. My great-grandfather journeyed to Shanghai from a small village, where he built an enterprise from the ground up. Despite his business success, the family remained in a rigid Confucian patriarchy. He had two wives, two sons, and one daughter. My grandfather, his eldest son, belonged to a new, rebellious generation — yearning for freedom. He found himself torn between an arranged marriage and his true love, between family duty and personal happiness. My cousin went on to tell me how the family enterprise emerged during the Opium War era of the late Qing Dynasty; how the business flourished during the Republic of China; how the family refused to collaborate with the Japanese and survived entirely on their savings for six long years during the occupation. The story was thrilling, filled with dramatic twists. She spoke for hours, driven by a deep desire for our family legacy to be preserved and not forgotten for future generations. “Why don’t you write it down and publish a memoir?”, I asked her. “Well, I’m not a writer,” she replied, “I can tell the stories, but putting them into words is hard.” And that, I realized, is a common challenge many people struggle with. That’s why Jane and I started this journey to create this app. Everyone has a story. Every family carries a legacy — just tell it to the app, and we will turn your voice into cherished stories for generations to read.