Core concepts

Learn the main objects and ideas that shape the Ember app.

Ember

Ember is our AI voice agent. Ember has been trained to help you remember things in a safe, hopefully enjoyable way. Ember appears in many forms in the app.

Ember understands almost any language, but works best in:

• English
• Korean
• Spanish
• Chinese
• Japanese
• Russian

You can choose the default language you would like to use in your personal settings page at /people/me.

Ember’s goal is to help you and your family talk about memories in a safe, engaging, thought-provoking, and authentic way.

We ask that you treat Ember with respect, just like you would a biographer, interviewer, friend, or colleague.

Memories

Memories, sometimes called completed sessions, are completed audio recordings of conversations you have with Ember in the app.

Today, we do not fully support free-form audio recordings, although you can say whatever you want to Ember if you choose. Instead, you usually record a memory by choosing a topic.

Topics

Topics are curated, hand-crafted prompts given to Ember so that sessions feel meaningful, focused, rewarding, and fun.

You can browse and discover topics in /topics, sorted by era and style.

We have more than 20 topics today, and we are rolling more out.

One way to think about topics: they are like game cartridges for Ember.

Topic eras

Eras are time periods in someone’s life, such as childhood, teenagerhood, and adulthood. In Ember, they help you organize freestyle topics or curated topics into a specific period in your life.

Curated topics are organized by era. You can see this from the topics page, where each row of topics has a visible era.

While early-life eras are explicitly named, later eras use seasons because life periods start blending into one another more:

• Childhood
• Teenage Dreams
• Roaring Twenties
• Summer, roughly 30s-40s
• Fall, roughly 40s-60s
• Winter, roughly 60+

Session notes

All memories have session notes attached to them.

Imagine a memory like a completed session with an interviewer or biographer. The interviewer would take notes so they could put together a great article or story.

Similarly, all completed memories come with these default session notes:

• the transcript of the audio recording
• Ember’s short summary of the conversation

Session artifacts

In addition to the audio recording, transcript, and short summary that come with all session notes, you can upload extra session artifacts:

• photos and videos of the memory
• text notes
• stories

Stories

Stories are one of the most magical features in Ember. Stories let you generate a story from a recorded memory in different prose styles and languages with one click.

• Once a story is generated in a language and style, anyone with access to that memory in your circle can edit their version of that story and publish it.
• Today, we support story generation in two languages, English and Korean, and three styles: Biographical, Light & Funny, and Guided Reflection.

Circles and families

Circles are groups of users, like members of a club, that can share memories with each other. Circles are also similar to vaults for recordings and assets. All memories belong in a circle, and you can choose which circle a memory and its assets should belong in.

• A user can belong to multiple circles.
• A user must accept an invite to join a circle.
• There are three types of circles:
  • self, your private vault
  • family
  • affiliation, such as clubs, organizations, or friend groups

Because the experience is best when families share memories, Ember also has the concept of a primary family. A primary family is one family circle, if you belong to multiple, that you designate as your main one. For now, the main functional difference is that it appears as a shortcut in your people settings page.

Circles can have up to three admins, who can invite users into that circle.