An autobiography that starts when you press record.

Otto is a memoir recorder that runs in the browser. You get a prompt and a record button, and an eight-minute answer about your grandmother's kitchen can finish a chapter without anyone opening a text field.

I built it because memoir software assumes the hard part is organizing what you wrote. The hard part is getting it out. Talking works where writing stalls: a blank page is a wall when your executive function is shot, a daughter can record a parent while the stories are still there, a dementia patient or a trauma survivor can say a hard thing out loud years before they can type it. The memoir is the demo. The same machinery is memory scaffolding for anyone whose recall needs structure.

The progress mechanic runs in reverse from Duolingo. There, many small exercises each get measured. Here you do one big free-form thing and the app finds the progress inside it. Otto grades each recording against a bank of 226 questions and attaches the transcript span and audio timestamp that earned the credit. Answered means here is where you said it. There is no count you have to take on trust. For people whose recall is fragile, that provenance matters twice: the record shows what they covered, and the audio proves it.

The bank sits on two axes over the same questions. Sixteen chapters open one at a time so nobody gets asked about the people they lost on their first evening. Threads run across everything and never lock, so someone who arrives thinking about their father can start there. Each question carries a register: what it costs to answer at ten at night. Not-tonight is a stored answer that sets a question aside without deleting it. An app that asks for the hardest things a person has has to take no.

It runs in English and Italian, with a third-person mode for interviewing a relative. Live at ottos-notebook.exe.xyz for invited users, still a beta. Access stays closed because the app holds real people's stories. That is also the limit: I have no way to grow it that does not start with me deciding who gets in.