Tell Me Forever

What it is for

Two people are involved, and they are almost never the same person. One — the account holder — decides the questions and pays. The other answers them out loud, and is usually a parent or grandparent who does not want to install anything, does not want an account, and is often not in the same country.

So Tell Me Forever does the asking. It supplies the questions, sends them to the person answering as a private link, records what they say, and hands the result back to the account holder as audio, as text, and as a printed book. Its purpose is to get somebody's account of their own life recorded and written down while it can still be asked for.

It is not a social network, a publishing platform or a storage service. Nothing recorded here is public, there is no feed, and there is nothing for anybody to browse.

What it does, step by step

1. Choose questions. The account holder picks a set of questions about somebody’s life, starting from sets we wrote, and edits, reorders or replaces any of them.
2. Invite the person answering. They are sent a private link by email. They do not need an account, a password or an application, and are never asked to make one.
3. They record their answers. One question and one large button, in the browser, on whatever device they already use.
4. We transcribe it. Each answer is converted to text automatically. The account holder can correct the transcript and trim silences or false starts from the audio.
5. You get the recordings. Audio and transcripts can be played, downloaded and deleted at any time.
6. You can schedule a message. Separately from the interview, a recording can be addressed to one person and held until a date you choose, up to ten years ahead. It is sealed when scheduled, can be cancelled until it is sent, and is delivered by email with a private link.
7. You can order a book. The answers are typeset into a hardback and posted, with a code beside each story that plays the recording of it. Ordering is optional; the recordings and transcripts do not depend on it.

What it costs

A bundle is $60.00 and covers 3 hours of recording and a paperback of up to 200 pages, printed and posted; in hardback it is $70.00. A new account is given thirty minutes without payment or a card. Recording beyond a bundle is $12.00 an hour at one flat rate, bought when it is needed and never expiring. There is no subscription and nothing renews.

What information it holds

• For the account holder: a name, an email address, and either a password or a Google sign-in.
• For the person answering: a name, and an email address or telephone number, supplied by the account holder rather than by us. Both are encrypted where they are stored.
• The audio recordings, the transcripts made from them, and any edits.
• A postal address, if and when a book is ordered, removed once the order is complete.
• Payment records. Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach us.

Why it asks for Google account data

An account can be created with an email address and a password, or by pressing "Continue with Google". Google is offered because it saves choosing and remembering a password, and because it confirms the address without a verification email.

If Google is used, three things are requested and nothing else: your name, your email address and your Google profile picture. The name and picture appear in your own account. The address is the account’s identity and where account notices are sent — a receipt, a password reset, a notice that somebody has answered a question.

No other Google data is requested. There is no access to Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Photos or any other Google service. No email is sent from your Google account, nothing in it is read, and nothing Google provides is used for advertising or given to anybody else.

Signing in with Google is optional. An email address and a password does everything it does.

Who can hear the recordings

Recordings are private. There is no public directory, no feed and nothing shared by default. They are audible to the account holder, to the person who recorded them, and to anybody the account holder deliberately shares a link or a printed code with. Audio is served through temporary signed links rather than public addresses.

Who we are

Tell Me Forever is at tellmeforever.com. What we collect, why, who it is shared with and how long it is kept is set out in full in our privacy policy, and the rules of use are in our terms of service.