Who will listen to your life story when no one else will?

It’s a sad truth that most of us will never get the chance to sit for hours with a biographer as they ask us questions about our lives and write down the answers to create a story. The tales of our unique individual lives need not go unrecorded any longer, however, thanks to the development of artificial intelligence and voice-assistant technology.

Memory Lane is a prototype app for voice assistants from Accenture Interactive and Stockholm Exergi, a Swedish energy company. Using a regular Google Home smart speaker, the team trained an AI that can carry out a more natural conversation. It can pick up on details in what the user is saying and ask follow-up questions. Over the course of many hours of conversation, which is stored on the speaker and can be paused and resumed at any time, the AI can put together a story of the user’s life.

The program was piloted with a group of 10 users in Stockholm between the ages of 75 and 101, to much success, documenting the stories of a World War II nurse and a leader of Sweden’s PRIDE movement. While it’s not yet available to the general public, the developers plan to create a free app in the future, for Google Home as well as Amazon’s Alexa.