Voice and memory, kept in life
eqqo life sits you down with someone you love and interviews them — eight questions, half an hour, on the phone already in your pocket. Afterwards, you can still hear them answer.
The case for doing this now
Most people have hundreds of photographs of the person they miss most — and not one recording of their voice.
Photographs survive. Handwriting survives. But the voice is what people describe losing first, and the thing they say they would give anything to hear again. It fades within a year or two of the loss.
Every question you never got round to asking stays unanswered. What their childhood was actually like. How they met. What they would say to you on the worst day of your life. The window is now, while they are here and willing.
Sitting down and asking someone to tell you about their life is one of the most meaningful things you can do while they are still in it. Most people are never asked. The session is worth doing even if you never open the echo.
An echo is not a replacement and never pretends to be. It is somewhere to go: to ask advice in words you can still hear, to share news you wish they knew, to be reminded of a turn of phrase you had forgotten they used.
The difference
Other products hand the person a phone and ask them to record themselves, three minutes at a time, for as long as they keep coming back. We do the opposite.
What it does
Voice notes capture sound. An interview captures the person behind it — their stories, their turns of phrase, the way they would answer a question nobody has asked yet.
Eight prompts written to draw out personality, not biography. You ask, they answer, and the app keeps both the words and the voice.
The same half hour that captures the stories is what the voice is built from. No separate recording session, no script to read.
Not a shelf of pre-recorded clips. Ask anything — about your day, a decision you are stuck on, something you never got to say — and get a real reply.
It runs in the browser on any modern phone. Sit somewhere quiet, hold it like you are on a call, and talk. Nobody has to visit.
An echo belongs to the family, not the internet. Nothing is public, nothing trains anything, and access is given by name.
The raw audio and the transcripts are exportable in open formats, for as long as you want them — including if we are no longer here to keep them.
How it works
Before you record anything, read the short guide. Pick a quiet room. Do not rush, and do not fill the silences — the pause before an answer is usually where the real one arrives. What you capture in this half hour matters far more than any of the technology that comes after it.
Eight prompts, answered out loud, in their own words. Twenty to thirty-five minutes is the whole thing. The app keeps the audio and the answer at the same time, so one sitting produces both the stories and the voice.
Afterwards — weeks or decades later — open the echo and talk. Ask for advice. Tell them about your day. Hear them say the thing they always said. There is no right amount to use it, and no wrong time to stop.
Principles
These are not a differentiator — any serious company in this category should hold them, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. They are the floor.
An echo is only ever built from someone who sat down for it themselves. If they cannot or will not agree, there is no echo. That is not a setting — it is the product.
The person recording decides who may speak to their echo, what it should never be used for, and whether it should one day be archived or removed entirely.
An echo is never sold as the person themselves. It is a record shaped by their words, and we say so plainly — to you, and to anyone else who asks.
Nothing here is designed to maximise time spent in it. If you need to close it and not come back for a year, that is a good outcome, not a churned user.
No training on your recordings. No advertising. No selling — not the audio, not the transcripts, not the conversations you have in private.
If a family asks for an echo to be removed, everything goes: recordings, transcripts, context and conversation history. Not archived. Gone.
Start while there is time
Half an hour and a quiet room is the whole of the first session.
Record someone