How Ethos works

Most of what you know about someone, you know because they told you. Ethos keeps what they actually said, and answers from it.

1. Start with what you already have

Every other way of recording a family history asks the same thing first: commit someone to months of homework. A prompt a week, for a year. That works if you have a year.

Ethos starts from what exists now — a voice note on your phone, one photograph, an exported chat thread. Six steps, one tap each, and every one of them skippable. In about two minutes there is something to talk to.

A chat export carries who said what, so an archive built from one knows the difference between their words and somebody else’s. Larger imports keep arriving for a while after you hand them over; the archive grows as they land.

2. Ask it something

You type a question the way you would ask a person. It answers from the recordings, messages and answers it holds — and it shows you which one the answer came from, so you can open the source and read the original for yourself.

That citation is not decoration. An answer is checked against the sources actually in front of it before it reaches you, and one that cites something absent does not get sent.

3. And when it has nothing, it says so

Ask about something nobody ever recorded, and it tells you it does not have that.

This is the part most people do not expect, and it is the point. A system that always has an answer is a system that invents one, and an invented memory of someone you love is worse than no memory at all. Ethos would rather disappoint you than make something up.

4. You can take it back

Delete a source and it is gone from every answer after that. Ask the same question again and it will tell you it no longer has that. Nothing is kept in reserve.

Who may see an archive, and who may speak with it, is decided by you and enforced before any answer is assembled — not filtered out afterwards.

Questions worth asking

If you are recording someone and do not know where to begin, the questions Ethos asks are published in full — sorted by what they are for, including the ones about how a person speaks rather than what they did.