Old Stories, New Tech: StoryWorth Captures Family Memories with Twilio Voice
Time to read: 1 minute
May 30, 2013
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The phrase “ship it” means one thing to Nick Baum (pictured right), and another to his father. To Nick, those are last words you hear before deploying code. To his father, “ship it” means to put something on a boat and send it off. This generational gap intrigued Nick Baum and led him to found StoryWorth, a new way to share and record family stories.
StoryWorth lets users create an online biography of their family’s history with archived pictures, text, and voice recordings. Nick grew up listening to his father’s stories of growing up in 1930’s Berlin, transatlantic voyages, and life before the technological boom. As a former Google software engineer and product manager, Nick leveraged new technology to preserve old stories.
StoryWorth assigns users Twilio Voice numbers they can call to record family stories and have them automatically archived as MP3s. “Voice was always something that was really exciting to me because voice is such an emotional medium,” Nick says. Adding the voice feature went along easier than Nick expected. “I checked out the Twilio Docs and this thing I thought was going to take weeks, I realized I could do in days.”
Nick focused on lowering technological barrier so anyone family member, regardless of their generation, can participate in StoryWorth. For example, my grandma may not know how to download an MP3, but she can easily create one by dialing a Twilio number, telling a story, and hanging up. The rest is automated and the recording is added to the family’s StoryWorth account.
“You’ll have these stories for your children, your grandchildren, and have a strong sense of family history,” says Nick. He’s currently working on adding archival features that make it easier for users to search their family records for data.
To learn more about StoryWorth visit their website here.
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