Heirloom: Keep Their Voice

Everybody means to record their grandparents. Almost nobody does, because the task is enormous and nothing tells you where to start. Heirloom makes it small: one question a week, asked out loud, answered out loud, kept forever in the voice that said it. ONE QUESTION A WEEK The app chooses a question and puts it on the screen in large type. What did your house smell like when you came home from school. Who cut your hair when you were a child. What did your father do when he came home from work. The elder presses one big button and talks. That is the whole ritual, and it takes a Sunday afternoon a week. THREE HUNDRED QUESTIONS, WRITTEN BY HAND Every prompt here was written for this app, not scraped from a list. They are arranged in seven packs: The long life works for anyone anywhere, and six more are tuned to a life. Before the wireless, for elders born before about 1945. The first television, for the postwar years. India and South Asia. Britain and Ireland. United States and Canada. And Leaving and arriving, for anyone who built a life in a country they were not born in. The engine leans toward subjects the archive has already touched, so the questions follow the life rather than a script. ELDER MODE Hand the phone over and the app becomes one screen with one button. Big type, no menus, no way to get lost, no way to delete anything by accident. Recordings run up to thirty minutes, pause and resume, and can be re-recorded if the first go was a false start. THE ARCHIVE Every answer is kept with its question, its date and who told it. Play them back, mark the moments you want to find again, tag the people and places that come up, and watch threads form: tap a name and hear every story it appears in, across voices. The Keepsake screen shows the archive as an object, one ring for every story, and gives you the way to get it off this phone: export every recording as an audio file with a readable manifest of who said what and when, through the share sheet, to a drive or a sibling. AND BACK AGAIN A Heirloom export can be restored. New phone, or a copy a sibling sent you: bring the file back in and the stories rejoin the archive with their tags, moments, titles and dates. Stories already there are left exactly as they are. ON THIS PHONE, AND NOWHERE ELSE Heirloom does not have the internet permission. It cannot upload your family's voices, because Android will not let it open a network connection at all. There is no account, no cloud, no analytics, no advertising ID, and no transcription service reading your recordings. The audio lives in the app's own storage on this device until you export it. That also means it is your job to keep a copy, and the app says so plainly rather than pretending to be a backup. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO It does not transcribe. It does not summarise. It does not clean up the pauses, or the accent, or the long silence before the answer to a hard question. Those pauses are the recording. Free, complete, and not a subscription. Some things should not be rented.