our little (rem)ember project
just two brothers passionate about voice AI, memories (of the human variety), and good writing
Hi! - we’re Ingwon and Daegwon. We’re brothers, and we’re new to Substack, although in fairness we’ve been longtime “lurkers” (subscribers?) This is a ‘hello world’ post, and an introduction to our family project, (rem)ember, which we hope to be a cool experiment in family memory and AI.
A bit about us
ingwon - i’ve had a lot of different career experiences. i started at Morgan Stanley as a bond trader, then worked for a few tech companies, mostly in the security/cybersecurity space, founded a labor marketplace called Glencoco, and now focusing on working on this more personal passion project.
daegwon - he’s shy, partly (read: mostly) for legal reasons around posting publicly because of his work, but high level he works as a venture capitalist.
What we both have in common is a deep, deep love for great writing, and for our family. Which… is probably a good segue to why we decided to start writing on substack. It starts with our dad.
The boiled egg that sparked our interest
Our dad turned 71 this year. Last Christmas, the three of us were sitting around after dinner, and he casually mentioned an anecdote about growing up in Korea in the 1950s. For context, in 1955, the GDP per capita of South Korea was $64. Literally one of the poorest countries in the world. Every day for lunch, he told us, his mom would pack him just two things - rice and kimchi - which he’d take in a lunchbox to school. But on his birthday, his mom would also add in a boiled egg.
His birthday present every year was a single boiled egg.
This kind of blew our minds. Obviously it’s so alien to how my brother and I grew up that it reads like a different world, despite being just one generation apart. But mostly, it was how matter-of-factly he mentioned it.
He didn’t say it like it was some tragic pity-inducing story. To him this was just a casual but cherished memory. It told us more about our dad than the ‘bigger’ things we knew - his education, his career path.
So we started wondering, how many more of these small details does our old man have in his head? And so we decided it’d be a fun project to collect these small memories and details from our parents when we could, and write family memoirs about them.
Wanting to collect stories but being too busy
It was a rough going at first. We tried to start with collecting voice memos/interviews - the obvious thing. The obvious thing was not easy. Our dad lives in Korea and we live in the US. Juggling zoom sessions across time zones with a voice recorder, not knowing what to ask or what to say, being ill-prepared for these sessions, and honestly, the awkwardness of three emotionally constipated men trying to get sentimental. Disaster.
Somewhere around this time, voice AI started getting better by a lot. Since we both work in tech/invest in tech, we’ll occasionally nerd out over research pieces and betas, and Sesame’s research preview blew us away. We started tinkering with some of them.
What if the conversation could be handled by something that wasn’t us getting on a zoom call? We’d love to schedule them regularly, but our schedules made it really hard to do on a consistent basis. What if awkward, difficult-to-schedule zoom conversations could be instead recorded, daily, with the most attentive interviewer in the world?
We wanted to collect and record all of his recollections and put together writing and stories about them. So, taking it a step further, what if these recordings could magically turn into prose, memoirs, and poems? What if…
Either we suck as interviewers, or there’s a weird niche place for a conversationalist that feels private
But we had a problem. My dad is pretty anti-tech. He refuses to use banking apps because he’s convinced his money will disappear. So we ran a test. We hopped on a zoom, told him he was about to speak with Ember - the name we gave to our interviewer app we built. He introduced himself. We held our breath.
He liked it. He spoke for 20 minutes. We were floored and a honestly a little butthurt, because he gave Ember more details then he had done with us…
After about a week, we realized he was talking to Ember daily.
More on why we think this has been the case (his preferring to talk to Ember over us) in a later post, but I think a big motivating factor is just that he wants to get his story out there.
So we kept building. We built a way to quickly start a conversation. To save memories. To explore different topics. To listen to the recordings. To make written stories out of them. Our dad uses it every day now. And the stories we have of him are now some of the most valuable things we own.
Seeing who else out there might find this useful
Two weeks ago we decided to share the thing we’d built for our family with other people. It’s available to explore at ember.build.
This blog is partly a space for my brother and me, like many of you, to wonder out loud about what we’re learning as we explore: voice as a technological interface, about what AI does and doesn’t do well, about memory and craft and families.
We also have really mixed thoughts about the intersection of AI and creative writing, so we hope to unpack that as we continue along this journey.
From our early experience with our dad and ember, it’s pretty clear that it’s adding value (recording his memories and childhood stories) in ways that otherwise just wouldn’t happen (we’d be too busy and coordination too difficult), but on the other hand, we’ve firsthand experienced and reflected on a lot of negative things (these will all be future posts!):
AI/chatgpt psychosis for some of our friends
AI slop
AI slop
AI slop
There is a lot of really thoughtful writing and discourse right now about Why AI isn’t going to make Art, why AI can’t write well, and if anyone builds it, everyone dies (we loved this book btw).
We will also in future posts unpack a lot of our thoughts about this, but high level, a lot of it is missing the forest for the trees. Like all technology, AI will lead to slop, anxiety-laden societal land mines. But we’re optimists, and we are of the camp that it can, should, and will be harnessed to bring the best out of us. To do things we’ve never done before. And to create beautiful, beautiful works…
The reason we’re sharing any of this is simple. These memories - through recordings, written stories, even poems that Ember shaped - are now our family treasures. If just one other family gets to experience this too, it will have been worth it.
If any of this resonates, feel free to follow us, or subscribe to us, or whatever you’re supposed to do on substack.
Also, DM us and we’ll comp you an Ember account in exchange for your thoughts - positive or negative. We’d rather have ten curious readers who push back than a thousand who don’t.
- Ingwon