Coming to iPhone

The box in the closet, finally read.

Somebody in your family kept the letters. Heirloom photographs them, reads the handwriting, and gives you an archive you can search — and an Archivist who can tell you what is in it.

Requires iOS 17 or later · one email when it ships, then we forget the address
A handwritten letter, sealed with wax

How it goes

  1. One

    Scan a sitting

    Lay the pages out and photograph them. The sitting is kept as a permanent record of what came out of the box that afternoon.

  2. Two

    The handwriting is read

    Pages are sent to Anthropic to be read. Back come a transcription, a date, and a guess at who wrote it — all of it yours to correct.

  3. Three

    Ask the Archivist

    Ask about a name, a year, a house. Every answer cites the page it came from, so you can go and read it yourself.

What comes back

The frost came early and took the last of the beans. Do not worry about us — we have the stove, and your father’s cough is better than it was in the spring.

Letter from Margaret, November 1943 — read from the scan, filed under her collection, and yours to correct a word at a time.

The app

The Archive: collections filed under Mother's side and Father's side
Every page, filed under its family.
A sitting's filing plan: the Archivist explains how sixteen pages became three documents
Your pages, read and filed.
The Archivist tab: recent conversations about the archive
An Archivist who knows the box.
A family tree drawn from the documents, generation by generation
Documents against the people in them.

Where your family’s pages live

Your archive is stored on this iPhone. Pages are sent to Anthropic to be read, and the answers come back to you. A meter counts the ink your reading spends — counts, never pages. That is the whole arrangement, said plainly, because it is your family’s papers we are talking about.

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Heirloom is coming to iPhone

Write to us if you have a question, or if you want to hear when it lands.

Get in touch