Some context first. My mom is not a writer. She’ll talk your ear off on the phone, but ask her to type anything longer than a text and it’s just not happening. So the reason I picked Remento over the other options was its whole pitch: you record yourself talking instead of writing it all out.

It runs on the same weekly-prompt idea as everything else in this space. A question shows up, except instead of writing an answer she records herself saying it, right on her phone. Remento transcribes the audio for you, and at the end of the year it all becomes a printed book. The feature they push hardest is that the book has little QR codes, so you can scan one and actually hear her telling the story in her own voice.

And I’ll say it plainly, that voice part is the real deal. Hearing my mom crack up halfway through a story about her first apartment is not something a paragraph of text was ever going to give me. If you asked me for the single best thing about the whole experience, it’s that, no contest.

The rest was more of a mixed bag.

The transcription gets you maybe 85 percent of the way there. Names came out wrong constantly. My grandmother’s name got mangled three separate ways, and anything my mom half-mumbled turned into total nonsense on the page. The catch is that if you don’t go back and clean it up, those mistakes end up printed in the book permanently. So most weeks I was in there editing, which is fine, but it is work, and “hands off” this is not.

The app was a second little hurdle. For me, no issue at all. For her it meant a couple of “wait, how do I do this again” phone calls before she could actually get a recording done. Not a dealbreaker on its own. But friction is exactly the thing that quietly kills these year-long projects, so it’s worth knowing about.

On price, it’s the same story as every service like this. The voice stuff is genuinely nice, and you are very much paying for nice.

So where does that leave me? Honestly, shrugging a little. We got the book, the recordings are something I’m really glad we captured, and I also burned more evenings fixing transcripts than I signed up for. If your person would much rather talk than write, Remento is leaning into a real strength and I’d say take a look. If you’re picturing something that just runs itself, that isn’t this. I don’t have a verdict to hand you. It did about half of what I was hoping for, did that half well, and that’s pretty much where I netted out.