Eternity, from SyphonDigital
Ask them now, while you still can.
Eternity keeps a person: their memories, their photographs, their voice, and the way they thought about things. It sits on one computer, with no account and no server, and you can encrypt it. And it comes with a companion that will answer questions about their life, using only what they actually wrote down.
Free. Windows 10 and 11. No account, and nothing to cancel.
It never leaves the machine
No cloud, no telemetry, no account. The vault is one file you can hold, and you can encrypt it.
It never makes anything up
"I never wrote anything down about that" is an answer the companion is required to give.
It outlives the software
Everything exports as plain files, and a sealed package explains how to open itself.
What it does
A life is mostly in the details nobody thinks to ask about.
Not a photo album and not a diary. Eternity is built around the things that go first: the names, the small stories, the way somebody put a sentence together.
An interview that knows what to ask
A hundred and fifteen questions people wish they had asked, across childhood, family, work, love and belief. Answer by typing or out loud, and it writes the spoken ones down for you to correct.
Bring in the shoebox
Point it at a folder of photographs and it reads the dates off them, groups them by the day they were taken, removes the duplicates and files them on a timeline. Scratches, fading and yellowing can be repaired without touching the original.
Their actual voice
Record them reading a few passages and it keeps the recordings as they are. Letters can carry a voice note, to be opened now or on a date they choose.
A companion, not a chatbot
Ask it about a year, a person, a place. It answers from the record and cites what it drew on. Without an internet connection it quotes their own words back rather than paraphrasing them, and it never claims to be the person.
Sealed for afterwards
Make an encrypted package for one person, spread copies wherever you like, and split the passphrase between several people so any three of five can open it. Nobody holds it alone, and we never hold it at all.
It shows you what is missing
Empty decades, photographs with nothing written about them, people who keep coming up and have never been explained. It tells you where the holes are while they can still be filled.
How it works
An afternoon to start. Years to finish, and that is fine.
-
1
Say who
Yourself, or somebody you are doing this for. A name and a year is enough to begin.
-
2
Empty the drawers
Photographs, scans, old recordings, documents. It sorts and dates them for you.
-
3
Answer a few questions
Three at a time is plenty. Speak them if writing is harder.
-
4
Seal it, and tell someone
An encrypted package, copies in several places, and the key split between people.
The promise
This is the most personal data a person owns, so it does not move.
Every other product in this category is a website you upload a life to. Eternity is a Windows application with no account to make and no server to trust. Turn the internet off and everything still works, including the companion, which then answers by quoting what was written rather than by rephrasing it.
- No account, ever. There is nothing to sign up to and nothing to cancel.
- Nothing is collected. No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reports.
- Encryption is yours. The key stays on your machine, encrypted by Windows for your account, never with us.
- Your own AI key, or none. Add an Anthropic key for fuller answers and memories are sent to Anthropic to compose them, which the privacy notice sets out in full. Without one, nothing leaves and everything still works.
- It opens without us. Every export is plain JSON and original files, and every sealed package carries a written specification and a short program that opens it with standard tools.
- Uninstalling leaves the vault. Removing the application never removes the record.
Questions
The ones worth answering honestly.
What happens to all this when I die?
That is the part most of these products skip. Eternity makes a sealed, encrypted package you can copy anywhere without worrying, and it splits the passphrase into pieces so that, say, any three of five people can open it together and no single person can do it alone. It also writes the letter that goes into a service like Google's Inactive Account Manager, explaining to whoever receives the file what it is and how to read it. It cannot check that you finished setting that up, and it says so plainly rather than showing you a tick.
Is it free?
Yes. There is no subscription and no gate on reading your own vault. If it is ever sold, that will be for new work rather than for access to what you have already written.
Do I need an AI subscription?
No. Everything works without one, including the companion. With your own Anthropic key it writes fuller replies and better follow-up questions; without one it answers by quoting the person's own recorded words. The key is stored on your machine and used from it.
Windows says the installer is from an unknown publisher.
It is not signed with a code-signing certificate yet, so SmartScreen shows a warning. Choose "More info" and then "Run anyway". The warning is about the absence of a certificate, not about anything found in the file.
Why is the download so large?
Because the speech recognition, face grouping and photograph colourisation models are inside it rather than being fetched later. No model and no feature is ever downloaded at runtime, so a computer that has never been online works exactly like one that has. The only thing Eternity ever fetches is a newer version of itself.
What if SyphonDigital disappears?
Then everything still opens. The vault is a standard SQLite file, the export is plain JSON beside the original photographs, and every sealed package contains a document describing exactly how it is encrypted along with a short program that decrypts it using ordinary tools. None of that needs this company to exist.
Can it do this for someone who has already died?
Partly, and it is worth being clear about the limit. You can bring in their photographs, letters and recordings, and write down what you remember. What it cannot do is invent the parts nobody wrote down, and it will not pretend to. The companion speaks only from what is actually in the vault.
The questions get harder to ask later.
Free. Windows 10 and 11. Nothing leaves your computer.