Cristian Cibils Bernardes On Building a Shareable, Searchable Legacy Without a Single App Install
Written by Matt Emma
Cristian Cibils Bernardes remembers the urgency he felt as he prepared to interview his grandmother. She was the family matriarch, the documentarian who archived great-grandparents’ journals and mapped out the family tree. Her life story included fleeing Europe with her MI6 father and settling in Paraguay. Two days before their scheduled call, she suffered a stroke that left her unable to speak for the final 18 months of her life.
“Nobody should have the questions they know they’re never going to get answered,” Cibils says. That moment became the catalyst for Autograph, the early-stage company he founded to help people preserve their life stories in a format that is both searchable and deeply personal. With no need for downloads or technical expertise, Autograph operates through weekly phone calls and creates a lasting digital footprint of a person’s voice, memories, and wisdom.
Using Voice to Remove Friction
Trained in Symbolic Systems at Stanford, Cristian has spent more than a decade working in artificial intelligence. But he believes the most powerful technology does not always require a screen. “I’m done with apps,” he says. “You open the app store, download a thing, sign up, get notifications you don’t want, and your phone becomes cluttered.”Rather than burden users with yet another application, Autograph is designed to be frictionless. The target demographic includes older adults, often 70 and up, who might find app-based services cumbersome. Their children or grandchildren sign up online, and the recipient simply gets a text or phone call from Walter, Autograph’s AI historian. The experience is as simple as answering a phone call, yet it is underpinned by advanced language models, transcription tools, and memory indexing. “It feels like talking to a person on the other side,” says Cibils. “The service is designed to make you feel like the main character.”
From Conversation to Searchable Legacy
Each conversation becomes part of a structured, web-based portal where users can access recordings, transcripts, and story summaries. Autograph automatically extracts key elements from those transcripts. If someone mentions a friend named Lisa, the system creates a page for Lisa, linking every moment she appears across interviews.“It’s like a personal Wikipedia of your life and the people in it,” Cibils explains. The same is true for places, events, or recurring themes. Family members can continue conversations about specific memories or contribute their own versions of shared experiences. The result is a dynamic, evolving archive of personal history, stored in a way that is both navigable and intimate.
AI Personas That Speak With Familiar Voices
Beyond documentation, Autograph builds a digital persona that sounds like the user and contains their memories. These AI-based models can answer questions as if they were the person speaking, offering perspectives on everything from life-changing decisions to simple recommendations. “Walter can hand the phone to someone you need to talk to. That might be a version of yourself from five years ago or someone who is no longer around,” Cibils says. It is not just a tool for remembering the past, but for engaging with time in both directions. Conversations that begin in the present often echo into the future, creating opportunities for users to reflect on how they have changed.Trust, Privacy, and the Architecture of Memory
Every element within Autograph is private by default. Users decide what to share and with whom, and the system enables highly specific permissions. A story about a college night out might be shareable with friends, while another memory is reserved only for children once they turn 18. “We’ve built this as a kind of bank vault for your memories,” Cibils explains. “We never weaponize your data. Everything we build is focused on making your life better and supporting the people you love.”For those who missed the chance to record a loved one directly, Autograph is developing tools to reconstruct personas from artifacts such as journals, photos, and legacy audio. Although these formats are often fragmented and difficult to organize at scale, Cibils believes the interim solution lies in community storytelling. “Every family member can add their favorite grandma stories,” he says. “It won’t be her voice yet, but we can preserve the impact she had on others.”
A Long-Term Conversation With Yourself
The platform’s structure enables people to revisit different phases of their own lives. As Cibils puts it, “You will not be the same person at year ten as you were at year one.” The ability to interact with past and future selves opens a new kind of dialogue, one rooted in continuity and growth. Autograph invites users to speak not only for their families but to their own evolving identity.To follow Cristian Cibils Bernardes’ work, connect with him on LinkedIn and X.
