The tapes are still in my mother's house.

When I was a teenager, I decided to write my grandfather Gustavo's biography. I bought a tape recorder. I sat with him a few times. I asked bad questions, he told good stories anyway, and then life did what life does — school, work, the next thing. The tapes went into a drawer.

Gustavo is gone now. The tapes are still in my mother's house. I've never been able to bring myself to listen to them, because a few afternoons is not a book, and I know how much of him isn't on them.

Almost everyone has a version of this story — the recorder bought and abandoned, the “we should really get their stories down” said for a decade about a mother, a mentor, an old friend. The problem was never admiration or intention. It's that a biography takes forty hours of patient, skilled asking, and the people who mean to do it have jobs and lives and no training in how to interview someone they've known forever.

So we built the biographer I needed then. His name is Boswell — after James Boswell, who followed Samuel Johnson around for years, writing down how he actually talked. Boswell is an AI, and we say so plainly, because the whole thing only works if it's honest. He calls on an ordinary phone, asks the questions a good listener would, never gets tired, never gets busy, and never lets a story go into a drawer.

The storyteller stays the author: they choose what to talk about, they read every chapter first, and they decide who reads it. Our promise is voice-fidelity — if the chapter doesn't sound like them, you owe us nothing.

Some lives get written down. We'd like there to be more of them.

— David, founder