The memory is the part nobody else has, and no amount of clever software can supply it. That is worth sitting with for a moment.
Do this
- Pick one memory. Not your whole life. One afternoon, one house, one person, one journey.
- Tell it out loud using the microphone from stop 4, in whatever order it comes to you. Ramble. Repeat yourself. That is fine.
- Ask it to turn that into one page, keeping your own words wherever it can.
- Read it and put back everything it smoothed away. The odd phrase, the detail that seems too small, the thing only your family would understand. Those are the parts worth keeping.
- Send it to somebody related to you.
Watch it done first, if you would rather
Let my human assistant John show you what that looks like. He does the same thing you are about to do, at the same speed, with nothing edited out.
Filming This one is not recorded yet. Everything you need is written out above, and the video will appear here when it is ready.
What just happened
Read it again and you can probably see the seam. The facts, the names, the smell of the kitchen, those are yours. The sentence rhythm and the tidy ending are its.
What it did was remove the obstacle, which for a lot of people is not the remembering but the blank page. That is a real thing to remove, and it is why this stop exists.
It also, almost certainly, made it slightly more generic. It has read a great many pieces of family writing and it drifts toward the average of them. Every detail you put back is a step away from that average and toward the thing only you could have written.
This is the clearest case on the whole trail of the tool being genuinely good at its half and no use at all for yours.
If something did not go as expected
- It sounds nothing like me.
- Give it a sample. Paste in something you wrote, a letter or an email, and say write it in this voice. It is good at that.
- It added things that did not happen.
- It fills gaps. Say use only what I told you, invent nothing and ask again.
- It made it sentimental and I am not.
- Tell it. Plainer. No nostalgia. Just what happened.
The view from here: Where your words end and its words start