She doesn't. You do.
She never sees a screen, never types, never logs in. You sit with her and ask, the way you would anyway, and the Echo keeps what she says. If you can record it on your phone, that is the whole technical requirement.
Her voice comes from any thirty seconds of her talking. Her face comes from a photograph you already have. And the recipes come out the way she actually tells them, which is the part a recipe card has never been able to hold. Not two cups. "Until it looks right." And why she does it that way, and who taught her.
Start in the kitchen. Cook something with her and record it. That afternoon is worth more than any form we could send you, and you do not need us in order to do it.
One thing we do ask: that she knows, and that she agrees. An Echo of someone is built with them, never about them.
Honestly, no.
An Echo is built from a person's own account of themselves, given in their own words, usually over a long time. If that never happened, there is nothing to build it from. What we could assemble out of letters, photographs and other people's memories would be a portrait made by the people who loved them. That is a real and worthwhile thing. It is not them, and we are not going to hand it to you as though it were.
If they left a lot of themselves recorded, hours of talking, a body of writing in their own voice, there is more to work with and it is worth a conversation. We will tell you plainly what it can and cannot be before you spend anything.
This is the whole reason we say start early. The window is while somebody can still tell you themselves.
That is your decision, and you make it at the start rather than in the middle. Always, never, or only when someone asks directly. It can differ for you, for family, and for anyone else, and you say who is allowed to change the answer later.
We write it down at the beginning because it is exactly the sort of thing that becomes hard to decide calmly later, and because it should never be settled quietly by a system on a family's behalf.
Whoever you say. An Echo can be private to one person, open to a circle you name, or public. Personal ones default to private.
Something told to an Echo in confidence stays with the person it was told to. It does not come back out for the next visitor, and it does not come out for someone who says they are family. That is enforced in how the thing is built, not left to its judgment in the moment.
Yes. You should know that.
It works from what it has been given. Where it has been told something, it is as accurate as the telling. Where it has not, it can reach, the way a person filling a gap in a story reaches. We build it to say it does not remember rather than invent, and that holds most of the time, not all of it.
So treat it as a person's account of themselves, with a person's gaps, because that is what it is. It is not a record, and nobody should be using it to settle a fact that matters.
That is the normal beginning, not a problem. A voice and a photograph get an Echo running. Everything else arrives the way anything is remembered, in pieces, when something brings it up.
Nobody should be sitting down to write out their whole life at once. That is the version that never gets finished.
You say, in advance. Who it passes to, whether it keeps running, who can reach it afterward, and whether it should say anything at all when the time comes.
It is one of the few parts of this we ask about early, because it is the one thing that cannot be decided afterward by the person it belongs to.
A one-time cost to build it, and a monthly cost to keep it running. The monthly is real infrastructure, not a subscription fee for access. An Echo that remembers you across visits and carries a mood that moves is doing work every time somebody talks to it.
The monthly is flat for a household. The same whether an Echo is spoken to twice in a month or every day. What it does not cover is an Echo used like a service, by a large group, at volume. If that is what you need, say so and we will price it properly rather than quietly meter you. And we are not going to be the reason a conversation stops.
The estimate takes a couple of minutes and gives you a real number, whether it is of you or of someone you love. It is the start of a conversation, not a checkout.