AI can write your father’s biography if he speaks English, answers questions on his own, and you will check every page. Apps that turn his recorded answers into chapters cost from nothing to US$397. What the apps on the market can’t do yet is hear Punjabi or Gujarati reliably, ask the second question, or know what to leave out.
The long answer follows: what the apps do, what they cost, how they handle Indian languages, and where a person still matters.
What can AI do in a biography today?
In English, AI is now good at the slow, mechanical parts of a biography: recording, transcribing, sorting and drafting a first version.
Most AI life-story products work the same way. A question goes to your father every week, by email, WhatsApp or a phone call. He answers out loud. Software turns his voice into text, and a language model rewrites the text into a chapter. At the end of the year, the chapters are printed as a book.
That covers four jobs a biographer used to do by hand:
- Asking on a schedule. The app never forgets to call.
- Transcribing. Hours of talk become text in minutes.
- Sorting. Stories get grouped by period or theme.
- First drafts. Spoken answers become readable paragraphs.
My team will use AI for some of this. As I wrote on 4 October, in my post on the ₹5 lakh book, AI tools now do “in an hour what used to take a week. Transcribing fifteen hours of tape. Sorting it into stories. Building a timeline.”
What do AI life-story apps cost?
AI life-story apps cost between nothing and about US$400, against several thousand dollars for a human writer.
These are the prices each company shows on its own site, checked on 5 October 2026.
| Product | How it works | A human writer? | Price | Indian languages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tell Mel | An AI interviewer phones your parent; each call becomes a chapter | No | US$39 (2 hours) to US$219 (24 hours) | Hindi |
| Remento | Parent records on a phone; “Speech-to-Story” writes the chapter; hardback with QR codes to the audio | No | US$99 a year, one hardback included | None (English and Spanish) |
| Storyworth | A question by email each week; phone recording on higher plans | No | US$69 to US$199 a year on its pricing page | Not stated |
| Life Story AI | Weekly question by email or WhatsApp, answers rewritten by AI | No | US$49 to US$199 | None listed |
| Meminto | Questions and automated calls, AI polishing you approve | No | US$99 to US$397, one-off | None listed |
| Memoirji | Guided WhatsApp chat by voice or text, turned into a PDF | No | First memoir free | Hindi listed |
| StoryTerrace | A human ghostwriter interviews and writes | Yes | From US$3,250 (Classic) | Not stated |
Two notes. Storyworth’s pricing table shows US$69 for the Basic plan, and its FAQ and homepage say US$59, so check the price at checkout. And StoryTerrace is in the table as a reference point. It uses human writers.
If the question is “can we afford to try one?”, the answer is yes. US$99 is a small bet. Try it first if your father writes in English and likes answering questions.
Free printable: 100 questions to ask your parents
Ten sessions, ten questions each, in the order that gets a parent talking. Print it, take it home, tick them off as you go. Leave your email and download it straight away.
Can AI write my father’s biography in Hindi or Punjabi?
AI transcription is fair in Hindi and much weaker in Punjabi, Gujarati and Bengali, unless the tool uses a model trained on Indian speech.
The clearest public numbers come from OpenAI’s own paper on Whisper, one of the most widely used speech-to-text models. On a standard test set, its large model got about one word in 25 wrong in English. In Hindi, about one in five. In Punjabi, Gujarati and Bengali it made more errors than there were words. Each of those three languages had under 1.5 hours of training audio, against 12 hours for Hindi (Whisper paper, Table 13 and Figure 11).
Those figures are for the 2022 model. OpenAI has released newer versions since, and says performance still “varies widely depending on the language”.
Models trained on Indian speech do much better. AI4Bharat, a research group at IIT Madras, fine-tuned Whisper on Indian speech and published the results in 2023 (Vistaar). Its error rate on read Punjabi and Gujarati was about 17 to 18 per cent. On rural phone-line Hindi, its error rate was 26.8 per cent, against 59.9 for Google.
That last finding matters most. A phone call with an 80-year-old father in a small Indian town is the kind of audio most AI memoir apps record. None of the apps I checked say on their public pages which speech model they use. And none of them list Punjabi or Gujarati. Tamil did better in the Whisper test, about one word in six wrong, but no app I checked lists it either.
So, if your father thinks in Punjabi, the transcript is where the book will break first. Whoever writes the book needs to hear the recording. Reading the text won’t do.
Where does AI go wrong in a life story?
AI goes wrong in a life story in three ways: it can invent words, it smooths out the voice, and it leaves the checking to you.
It can invent. A 2024 study of Whisper, “Careless Whisper”, found invented phrases in about 1 per cent of transcriptions, and more often when speakers paused for long stretches (Koenecke and others, 2024). The study’s speakers had aphasia, but older speakers often pause for long stretches too.
One per cent sounds small. Across fifteen hours of a father’s stories, it is enough that someone has to check the transcript against the audio.
It averages the voice. A language model rewrites speech into tidy prose. The repetitions, the half-sentences, the Hindi word he always uses for his mother: those are what the model tends to smooth away first, and they are what make a book sound like him.
It leaves the checking to you. Storyworth’s terms, updated in September 2026, ask users to verify the accuracy of AI-generated content. That is fair. It also means the dates, the names and the order of events are your job.
Ask one more question before you upload your parents’ voices: what happens to the recordings?
| Product | What it says about AI training (own pages, checked 5 Oct 2026) |
|---|---|
| Remento | Content is not used to train AI models (FAQ) |
| Storyworth | Customer content is not used to train external AI systems (privacy policy) |
| Memoirji | Stories are never used for AI training |
| Tell Mel | Names its AI providers as processors; rules out voice cloning; content may be used to improve services |
Read the policy before the first call. Your father’s stories include other people’s lives too.
What can’t AI do?
AI can’t ask the second question, can’t notice what your father didn’t say, and can’t decide what belongs in the book.
An app asks the next question on its list. A person can listen for how the first answer was said (the pause, the change of subject, the laugh) and ask about that.
Then there is what stays out. As I wrote on my page about writing a father’s life story, what stays out is a decision taken with as much care as what goes in, before publication, not discovered after. A brother who hasn’t spoken to him in years. A business that failed. A model doesn’t know which silences are private and which are the story.
I draw the line here in my own work. On the full book, I write every page: no junior, no model drafting. As I put it on 4 October: “The writer still asks the second question. The writer still sits with the pages till they sound like your mother.”
From the desk
My answers page asks a close cousin of this question, and my answer there is short. AI “can produce competent prose from your transcripts and it cannot conduct the interview that gets the thing you have never told anyone.” The value in this work is in the room, not at the keyboard.
Everything above is the long version of that line. The keyboard part is where the apps are good. The room is still a person’s job.
Which should you choose: an AI app or a biographer?
Choose an AI app if your father speaks English and enjoys answering questions. Choose a person if the book has to sound like him in his own language.
| Your situation | What fits |
|---|---|
| Father is comfortable in English, likes to talk, budget under US$400 | An AI app: Remento, Storyworth or Meminto |
| Father talks best on the phone, in Hindi | Tell Mel lists Hindi; listen to the recordings yourself |
| Father thinks in Punjabi or Gujarati | A person who speaks the language, at least for the interviews |
| You want the stories saved now and the book later | Record with any app today; the recordings are useful to a writer later |
| You want a finished book that sounds like him, in English, from a mix of languages | A biographer |
The fourth row matters most. Recording him now is the part that can’t wait. Any app, or a phone on the table, is better than nothing. A writer can work from those recordings later. If you are recording from another country, this guide to interviewing your parents from abroad covers how.
If you want a person: the gift book is 10 to 12 stories in about 25,000 words, from 15 to 20 hours of interviews in whatever mix of English, Hindi and Punjabi your parent thinks in. It starts at US$5,000 and typically goes up to US$10,000.
Questions people ask
Can ChatGPT write a biography of my father from my notes?
Yes, it can turn notes into readable prose. It will also fill gaps with plausible details that aren’t true, so every name, date and place needs checking against what your father said. It works best on a transcript you have already corrected.
Is it safe to upload my parents’ voice recordings to an AI app?
It depends on the app. Some, like Remento and Memoirji, say they don’t train AI on your stories; others say content may be used to improve their services. Read the privacy policy first, and remember the recordings mention relatives who haven’t agreed to anything.
Can I use an AI app now and hire a writer later?
Yes. Recordings from an app are useful raw material for a biographer, especially if you keep the audio as well as the transcript. Keep the original audio files.
Which AI memoir app works in Hindi?
Of the apps I checked on 5 October 2026, Tell Mel and Memoirji list Hindi. None listed Punjabi, Gujarati or Tamil.
If you want to hear what your father’s voice sounds like on a page before deciding, start with A Page in Your Voice: five minutes of recording, one page back within a week, for US$1,000, credited against the book.
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