To record your parents’ life story on a phone, use the phone’s own recorder at its best quality setting, clip a wired mic to their collar, record ninety-minute sessions in a quiet room, name each file with the date first, and copy it to three places the same day. Record in the language they speak. Transcribe later.
That is the whole method. Below are the exact settings on an iPhone and an Android phone, read on Apple’s, Samsung’s and Google’s own support pages on 19 October 2026, and what to do when your father talks in three languages in one sentence.
The wider job, from the first conversation to a printed book, is in my twelve-step guide to writing your parents’ life story. This post is the recording part, in detail.
Which app should you use to record your parents’ life story?
Use the recorder that came with the phone. It is free, it doesn’t need an account, and it won’t stop working when a start-up closes.
| Phone | App | What to set before the first session |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone | Voice Memos | Settings > Apps > Voice Memos > Recording Mode. Choose Stereo, or keep Spatial Audio on newer models. If you see an audio quality option, choose Lossless |
| Samsung Galaxy | Voice Recorder | ⋮ > Settings > Recording quality: High. Switch on Block calls while recording |
| Google Pixel | Recorder | Switch on Back up and sync, so each recording also goes to recorder.google.com |
A few details from the makers’ own pages are worth knowing before you start.
- Apple’s Voice Memos stops if another app starts playing audio, by Apple’s own guide. So no WhatsApp voice notes or YouTube on that phone during a session.
- Apple describes Lossless on the Mac as the choice for “high-quality, larger files”, against Compressed for smaller ones. Apple’s iPhone guide doesn’t document the setting, so if your phone doesn’t show it, the default is fine.
- Samsung warns that a recording can end early when the screen locks. Its fix is to allow the app to run in the background and turn off battery optimisation for it.
- Samsung has an Interview mode that uses the top and bottom microphones for two people facing each other. It’s useful when the phone sits on the table between you.
- Google’s Recorder records up to 18 hours in one file and keeps going when the screen sleeps.
Before every session, put the phone on Do Not Disturb and charge it. A call or an alarm in the middle of the Partition story can cost ten minutes you can never get back.
Do you need a microphone?
Yes, one, and it costs about ₹1,000. Your mother will be a metre away from the phone and turning to look at the photograph, and a clip-on mic stays with her voice.
- A wired clip-on (lavalier) mic. On my guide page I list the Boya BY-M1 at ₹939 on sale at boya-mic.in, read on 17 September 2026. Clip it a hand’s width below the chin.
- An adapter, if the phone has no headphone jack. Apple’s USB-C to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter is ₹1,090 on apple.com/in and US$9 on apple.com, read on 19 October 2026.
- Two people at once. For a session with both parents, put the phone flat on a folded towel between them. Baylor University’s oral history manual says to place the microphone between you and the narrator.
Record ten seconds, play it back with headphones, then start. Baylor’s manual asks for that test of both voices every time.
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.
Audio or video?
Record audio every time, and add video for the photograph session.
Audio is what you’ll transcribe and what your children will listen to.
It is small, it doesn’t make anyone self-conscious, and the phone can lie flat on the table where nobody looks at it. Video is worth it once: the session where your parents go through the albums and argue about who is in each picture. Prop a second phone on books for that one, and keep the audio recorder running as well.
How should you name and back up the files?
Date first, then the person, then the session number: `2026-10-25-papa-session-03`. Files named this way sort themselves in order on every computer.
Rename each recording on the phone as soon as the session ends. On an iPhone, tap the recording, tap the name, and type. Otherwise Voice Memos names it New Recording, or after your location if Location Services is on, and ten files called “Pune” are no help to anyone.
Then copy it the same day to three places:
- The phone keeps the original.
- A laptop or a USB drive. On an iPhone, share the recording to Files; Apple exports it as an .m4a file by default.
- A shared cloud folder your brothers and sisters can open: iCloud, Google Drive or Google Recorder’s own backup.
Baylor’s oral history guidance asks for at least four separate places. Three is my minimum for families.
A note on space. Baylor puts uncompressed CD-quality mono audio at 3 hours and 13 minutes per gigabyte, which is about 310 MB an hour.
Fifteen hours of interviews, the low end of a gift book, comes to under 5 GB even at that quality. Check you have the space before session one, not halfway through session four.
How many sessions, and how long?
Ninety minutes, once a week, one topic each, in the morning. Baylor’s manual puts a good interview at sixty to ninety minutes.
Ten sessions of ninety minutes give you fifteen hours, which is enough for a book of about 25,000 words. My 100 questions to ask your parents are laid out as those ten sessions, and if a grandparent is in the house, there are 60 questions to ask your grandparents too.
Start every recording with a spoken label: “Papa, Krishan Lal Mehta, interviewed by his son Rohan, on Sunday 25 October 2026, in Ludhiana. Session three.” Baylor’s manual suggests the same. If the file name is ever lost, the recording still says what it is.
Don’t stop the recorder when the tea arrives. The best story of the morning can come then.
What if your parents speak Hindi, Punjabi or Gujarati?
Record in whatever they speak, mid-sentence switches and all, and decide about translation later. That mix is how they think, and it is how the book should sound.
The recording is the easy part. Transcription is where language matters, and here is what each free tool says on its own page:
| Tool | Hindi | Punjabi | Gujarati |
|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone Voice Memos transcription | No | No | No |
| Google Recorder on a Pixel | Yes, live | Not listed | Not listed |
| OpenAI’s Whisper (free, runs on a laptop) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Apple lists English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Chinese for Voice Memos transcription, on iPhone 12 or later. No Indian language is on the list. Google’s Recorder transcribes Hindi live and can transcribe again in Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, but Google warns that this may send the audio to its servers. Whisper’s language list includes Hindi, Punjabi and Gujarati, and its own notes say accuracy varies a lot by language.
No tool handles a sentence that starts in Hindi, takes a verb from Punjabi and ends in English without mistakes. Plan for a person who speaks the mix to read the machine’s draft against the tape. That person is you, with headphones.
If you live in another country and the sessions are video calls, the set-up changes: record at their end, not yours. That is in how to interview your parents from abroad. Note that Apple’s call recording isn’t available in the UAE, by Apple’s own guide, so a son in Dubai shouldn’t rely on it.
The checklist for the first session
Print this, or keep it on the other phone.
- Phone charged, Do Not Disturb on, at least 5 GB free.
- Recorder at its best quality; Block calls on, on a Samsung.
- Mic clipped a hand’s width below the chin; ten-second test played back.
- Fan turned down a notch, television off in the next room, the household told you need ninety minutes.
- Spoken label: names, date, place, session number.
- One object on the table: a passport, a ration card, a wedding card, a photograph.
- After: rename the file, copy it to three places, write the best story in one line with its time.
From the desk
On my guide page I wrote that most families finish the asking and stall in the writing, with the recordings on a phone. But the recordings are the part with a clock on it. As I put it on my personal historian page, the book can be commissioned in five years. The interviews can’t be recorded in five years if the person is gone.
So get the recording right, and don’t worry yet about what happens to it. For the record, my gift book is ten to twelve stories from 15 to 20 hours of interviews, written by me, starting at US$5,000 and typically going up to US$10,000. Travel to sit with your parents is paid by you, at cost.
Questions people ask
What is the best app to record my parents’ life story?
The recorder already on the phone: Voice Memos on an iPhone, Voice Recorder on a Samsung, Recorder on a Pixel. They are free, need no account and save files you can copy anywhere. Set the highest quality before the first session.
Should I record my parents on audio or video?
Audio for every session, and video for the session with the photo albums. Audio is easier to transcribe and makes nobody self-conscious. Video earns its place when the pictures are on the table.
Can I record my parents’ stories in Hindi or Punjabi?
Yes. Record in whatever mix they speak. For transcription, Google’s Recorder handles Hindi on a Pixel, and OpenAI’s Whisper, which runs free on a laptop, lists both Hindi and Punjabi as well as Gujarati. Expect to correct its draft by ear.
How much storage does recording a life story take?
Under 5 GB for fifteen hours, even uncompressed. Baylor University’s oral history guide puts CD-quality mono audio at 3 hours 13 minutes per gigabyte.
If you’d like to hear how your parent reads on a page before deciding anything else, A Page in Your Voice turns a five-minute recording into one page in their voice within a week, for US$1,000, credited against a book.
Leave a Reply