Imagine you are visiting your grandparents, they pull out some old pictures and start telling stories. Then they get old, lose their memories, and die, leaving you with thousands of photos, journal entries and random records that you know almost nothing about. This leads to my question: How can we turn family records into meaningful stories, connections, and stronger relationships with our families?
In 2024 I scanned over 23,000 photos from my Grandma’s closet, and now I need an app that can help me capture those stories from my aunts and uncles before it’s too late.
The easiest way to capture stories is to simply look at pictures and talk about them. I needed an app where you could simply pull out your phone or tablet at the next family reunion, browse through photos and talk about memories and stories. My app, StoryTime, will record and transcribe the conversation, extracting people, places, dates, events and stories, then save them to a shared family timeline. Through integration with FamilySearch Memories, those stories will be saved forever. And with social features, you can easily share and collaborate on family stories to tell it the your way. 😉
The strength of this app is that it is so much easier to describe what’s in a photo of you from high school than to try to remember details of your high school experiences without any context. StoryTime sits at the space between photo apps, family tree apps, and family story apps.
It started the idea for a personal life timeline to learn the most from my life experiences. As I started designing and prototyping using AI, I discovered this idea for a shared family timeline where users can collaborate by telling stories about photos together.
The first prototype was a very rough concept that included a timeline for records, and a way to add comments and voice comments.
Then I created another prototype that allowed the user to record their experiences and see a transcription of their conversation on each record.
As I tested, came up with ideas, corrected errors, and tested again, it became clear to me that I can’t just design how the app looks, I need to design how the app thinks. I needed it to recognize names, places, dates, and events from a messy conversation with multiple people and topics. Through Natural Language Parsing (NLP) and AI large language models, I have been learning how to teach the system to accurately extract meaningful information from recorded conversations and export them as clean, narrative stories about people and events. There’s still a long way to go.
I started this project with no coding knowledge or experience. After over 6 prototypes and 100’s of iterations, I still have no coding knowledge, but a lot more coding and app development experience. The next step is to create a working web application that can be used on smartphones and computers, and to vigorously test the system against the needs of the target market. I will be visiting with an elderly couple soon to start digitizing their family photos, then perhaps we can capture those stories that might otherwise get lost forever.
You can try the prototype here: https://lifetime-a80e5.web.app
Simply upload photos, press StoryTime and start talking about your pictures with family. Message me at jacob@de-arman.com to get early access to the real app.
Sincerely,
Jacob De Arman