Oak Tree Memories
Oak Tree Memories is a private space where your family gathers its stories, photos, and memories — and can ask an AI to help explore everything you’ve shared together. Your family builds the library; Oak Tree helps you explore it. It isn’t a social network, a genealogy service, or a place to store files and forget about them. It’s a place to discover something wonderful about the people you love.
Start with one story. Once you’re signed in, you’ll land on your family’s Home page with a few simple ways in: tell a story yourself, browse what others have already shared, ask a question about any family member, or add someone to your Family Tree. There’s nothing to set up first — just begin wherever feels natural, and let it grow from there.
Every signed-in page has the same simple navigation: Home, Browse Stories, Ask Family, Family Tree, and My Library, plus a button to Tell a Story any time. Living Memoir and Guide are both reachable from Home as well. If you’re ever unsure where to find something, Guide — the small button in the corner of every page — can point you in the right direction, or just tell you how something works.
Guide is Oak Tree’s help assistant, reachable from a floating button on every page. Ask it a plain question about how Oak Tree works, or ask it to help you find something your family has already shared. It can also add a person to your Family Tree on your behalf — but it always shows you exactly what it’s about to do and waits for a clear yes first. Guide never conducts a story interview itself — if you tell it you want help telling your story, it will point you to Living Memoir instead.
Living Memoir is the guided way to build a fuller life story over time, through conversation instead of a blank page. It opens with two simple questions — what you’d like to be called, and what you’re hoping to get out of it — and then becomes an ongoing, patient conversation with no deadline and nothing “still due.” Come back in five minutes or five months; it picks up right where you left off. You can type or speak, and as you talk, it listens for real, complete memories and offers to write one up as a finished story only once it genuinely has the material. Nothing is ever saved until you’ve seen it and approved it.
Every story you approve in Living Memoir becomes part of your family’s Browse Stories right away — visible to your family the same moment you save it. If you mean a full, bound memoir made of many stories woven together, that’s what the Ghostwriter is for (see below): it compiles everything you’ve written about your own life into chapters you can review and download as a Word document. From there, printing or publishing it however you’d like — a bound book, a PDF for the family, whatever you choose — is up to you; Oak Tree doesn’t currently offer its own printing or publishing service.
Tell a Story is the direct route: type or record one memory at a time, whenever something comes to mind, with an optional photo, title, or year. Living Memoir is the guided route: an ongoing conversation that helps you build a fuller story over time, asking thoughtful questions and offering to write things up as you talk. Neither replaces the other — use whichever fits the moment, or both.
Not yet as a file upload — but Tell a Story’s text box is completely free-form, so you can copy and paste anything you’ve already written straight in. A dedicated way to import a document (a Word file, for instance) isn’t built yet, but it’s a reasonable thing to want as Oak Tree grows.
No. Photos are entirely optional — add one from your phone or computer if you’d like, but plenty of wonderful stories on Oak Tree have none at all.
Both Tell a Story and Living Memoir let you speak instead of type. Tap the record button, and Oak Tree turns what you said into an editable transcript you can review before saving. Living Memoir’s Speak mode goes further — it listens hands-free during a live conversation and can read its replies back to you, so you never have to type or tap between turns.
Oak Tree’s AI shows up in three places. Guide answers questions about how the app works and helps you find things your family has shared. Living Memoir holds a patient conversation and helps shape what you say into a finished story. Ask Family answers a question about a family member using only what your family has actually written or recorded — never anything from outside what your own family has put into Oak Tree.
Yes — Oak Tree is a private space for your family, not a public site. Nothing you write is visible to anyone outside the people you’ve invited in. Today, every story shared inside a family is visible to everyone in that family; there isn’t yet a way to mark one story “just for me,” though it’s something we’re thinking about. And your stories are always yours: if you ever leave a family space, you take copies of everything you wrote with you.
Oak Tree’s AI is built to stick to what your family has actually shared — it’s explicitly instructed never to invent a memory, a quote, or a detail that wasn’t actually written or said. When it answers a question, it tells you which stories it drew the answer from, and if your family hasn’t shared enough to answer something, it will say so rather than guess. No AI is perfect, though — if an answer ever looks wrong, we genuinely want to know. “Share a Thought,” in the corner of every page, reaches us directly.
Ask Family answers as though your family member is speaking, in the spirit of what they actually shared with your family — but it is still built entirely from their real stories. How convincingly it captures their particular way of speaking depends on how much they wrote or told you while they were here. The more someone has shared, the more it will sound like them. It will never invent a manner of speaking, or put words in their mouth beyond what they actually said.
The Ghostwriter helps you turn everything you’ve written about your own life — through Tell a Story and Living Memoir — into one connected memoir. It organizes what you’ve shared into chapters, and if there’s a real gap in the story, it will ask you about it directly rather than invent a way to bridge it. You review, edit, and approve every chapter yourself before anything is final — nothing is saved without your say-so. You can download the whole thing as a Word document, edit it there if you’d like, and bring your changes back in.
Tell a Story and Living Memoir both let you write about someone else — just tag them as the subject, and your story about them appears on their own page in Family Tree and in Browse Stories, the same as a story about anyone living. The Ghostwriter works a little differently: it only ever compiles the living author’s own material, in their own voice, into their own memoir — it can’t write a memoir “as” a family member who has passed. If you want to preserve a parent’s or grandparent’s memories, the way to do that today is by writing stories about them yourself, through Tell a Story or Living Memoir — those become a lasting part of their page in Family Tree.