Companion app · Lifestyle
Zeide's Table
Family Stories, One a Week
FreeNo accountThe stories your family tells — kept in the voice that tells them.
Every week, Zeide's Table gives you one question worth asking. You hand the phone to a parent or grandparent, press one big button, and keep their answer. Over a year it becomes something you could never recreate afterwards: a family archive in their own voice, keyed to the Jewish year.
One question a week.
A voice you can never recreate later.
A year of stories. An heirloom.
It never leaves this phone.
How it works
- This Week — one story-eliciting question, big and clear, and a huge record button anyone can use
- Choose your interview kit: the original year of 120 mixed questions, or a themed set — coming over, the war years, courtship and marriage, childhood and school, food and recipes, faith and shul, work and trade
- Add photos to a story, at the time or years later
- Transcripts written on the device itself, and yours to correct
- Archive — every recording by year and by speaker, with the Hebrew date and the parsha, searchable down to the words inside a transcript
- Speakers — who is talking, their relationship, and optionally that they are of blessed memory
- On a yahrzeit, a quiet banner opens straight onto one of their own recordings, ready to play
The Book
The archive typeset as something you can hand to someone: a cover, a dedication, a chapter for each voice in the order your family sat down, every story with its English and Hebrew date and the parsha, photos in place. Choose the title, the dedication and whose stories go in, read the pages, then print it or share the PDF.
A safe copy
The question nobody asks until it is too late: what happens to this archive when the phone does. One passphrase-locked file holds every recording, photo, transcript and the book — put it wherever your family keeps things that matter. A plain-text letter goes beside it saying whose archive this is, who is meant to have it, and how to open it. A forgotten passphrase cannot be recovered by anyone, including us.
On this phone
If your iPhone supports Apple Intelligence, the app can read the transcripts your family recorded and offer a name for each story, an index of the people, places and years it mentions, a follow-up question drawn from something said and never explained, and a draft opening for a chapter of the Book. All of it runs on the device — no transcript is ever sent anywhere. Everything it writes is a suggestion, yours to edit or throw away.
About privacy
Nothing is shared without your permission. There are no accounts and no server of ours holding your family's voices; nothing is sold and nothing is analysed by anyone. Recordings live in the app's own storage on this phone, and — if you have iCloud Backup on — in your own private iCloud under your Apple account, never ours. Audio and transcripts reach another person only when you export, send or print them.
A companion to Derekh Learning, the full Jewish-learning app.