Can people record their answer rather than write it?

Yes. Speaking is often the easier ask, and somebody who would never write five hundred words will happily talk for five minutes.

Is the original recording kept?

Yes. The written version never replaces what somebody actually said; the recording stays attached to the memory.

Easily, and many people should. They are answers to different questions: who somebody was, and what a particular day was like for everybody in it.

Compared with Remento

Remento keeps one voice. We keep all of them, on one occasion.

Both of us turn talking into something you can hold. Remento is built around a single storyteller and a year of their life. We are built around one event and everyone who was at it.

What Remento does

Remento sends one storyteller a weekly prompt by email or text. They answer out loud from any device, with nothing to install, and Remento turns the recording into a written chapter. Their phrase for it is "No writing required, they just speak."

After a year it becomes a full-colour hardcover, and each chapter carries a QR code that plays the original recording, so the book keeps the actual voice. At the time of checking their site it was listed at 99 US dollars for the year including one book.

The voice-preservation idea is genuinely good, and for one person's life story it is hard to argue with.

Checked against their own site on 13 October 2026. They may have changed things since, and prices in particular move. Check with them before deciding.

What How We Saw It does instead

Our unit is not a person. It is a day, a trip, a wedding, a match, a send-off.

You decide the sections people write under, send one link, and everyone who was there adds their own account. They can type it or say it out loud, the same as Remento, but the point is the plural: six people describing the same afternoon, not one person describing sixty years.

The result is something nobody in the group could have produced alone, including you.

Side by side.

	Remento	How We Saw It
Who contributes	One storyteller	Everybody who was there
Subject	That person's life	One shared event
Input	Voice, turned into chapters	Writing or voice, in their own words
Timescale	A year of weekly prompts	Usually a few weeks
Who sets the questions	Their prompts	You write the sections
Original audio kept	Yes, with QR codes in the book	Yes, the recording stays with the memory

Which one you actually want.

Use Remento instead if

You want to keep one person's voice, literally, for the people who come after.
The storyteller would talk for an hour but will never write a page.
What you are recording is a life rather than an occasion.
A weekly rhythm over a year suits them better than being asked once.

Use How We Saw It instead if

You want one event held from every angle, not one life from one angle.
The people who could fill in what you missed are reachable right now.
You want to decide what gets covered rather than work through somebody else's prompts.
It happened recently and the detail is already starting to go.

They sit side by side perfectly well. Remento for your dad's life in his own voice. How We Saw It for his retirement do, told by the people who worked with him for thirty years.

Questions.

Can people record their answer rather than write it?: Yes. Speaking is often the easier ask, and somebody who would never write five hundred words will happily talk for five minutes.
Is the original recording kept?: Yes. The written version never replaces what somebody actually said; the recording stays attached to the memory.
Could we use both?: Easily, and many people should. They are answers to different questions: who somebody was, and what a particular day was like for everybody in it.

One voice is a life. Six voices are a day.

If the thing worth keeping is an occasion, and the people who were there are still about, start now.

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