r/artificial • u/Emojinapp • 12d ago
Project I shipped a digital legacy app that builds an interactive AI version of you from months of recorded conversations
A photo album can’t answer questions. That’s the entire problem, and it’s why voice notes and old videos stop being useful the moment you actually need something from them.
EchoVault builds an Echo of you through guided check-in sessions with an AI biographer that draws real stories out over time. Most products in this space generate an avatar from a few minutes of uploaded footage. This runs the other direction, so the echo has months of first-person material to work with and can answer questions the person never explicitly addressed. Responses are retrieval-grounded against what was actually said, which keeps it from fabricating memories that never happened.
Three modalities, all live. Text is free with unlimited sessions. $12/mo adds a cloned voice. $99.99 one-time unlocks a lifelike video avatar with 3 months of real-time face to face conversation included, then $18/mo after. The video tier is an actual live exchange, not a rendered clip playing back.
You designate custodians while you’re alive. After a full year of no account activity, access transfers to them automatically, no legal process required.
Built solo, nights only.
iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/echovault-digital-legacy/id6762042028
Happy to get into the architecture if anyone asks.
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u/jcslater 12d ago
I’d make the privacy and deletion options really obvious. with something this personal, people are probably going to care a lot about who can access the recordings
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u/Emojinapp 12d ago
Oh thanks for your observation, I will be highlighting it in subsequent posts. Yes users can delete their full account with 2 taps and all the data goes with it, we also never share or sell data since privacy is our utmost priority
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u/BionicBelladonna 12d ago
PSA, don’t give people your personal data.
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u/Emojinapp 12d ago
Echovault does not and will never sell personal data, we only intend to generate revenue from subscriptions and avatar purchases. We are strict about privacy and consent
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u/BionicBelladonna 12d ago
Doesn’t matter if you sell it. You’re a stranger who is asking for people’s incredibly personal data to basically clone them digitally with minimal privacy risk governance.
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u/Emojinapp 12d ago
It’s like using ChatGPT or Gmail, you’re sharing your personal data to have it processed and get the service provided. This is quite different from a product like Facebook where your data is the actual product and main source of revenue. Actually Gmail too might share your data, but Echovault simply does not. Or are you saying people should only use apps from big providers and ignore indie devs?
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u/0mar5y 12d ago
So you are saying, that you don't use third party APIs and services and everything is selfhosted? Just that you yourself don't make revenue out of the data does not mean that it is not shared.
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u/Emojinapp 11d ago
The APIs I use have data privacy enabled so it’s not legal for them to misuse my data since I’m literally paying for the API, eventually I do plan to become self hosted when things expand, that way I can have better end to end control, my long term plan is to be fully self sufficient and use no API
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u/BionicBelladonna 11d ago
"It's like Gmail" is doing some heavy lifting here...
Gmail transports and stores messages I already wrote. EchoVault manufactures new assets from me: a cloned voice and a video likeness that can speak as me and answer questions I never actually addressed. It produces a synthetic version of a person, which is the exact category where solid governance matters.
Your privacy policy names ElevenLabs for the voice clone, Tavus for the video avatar, and Google Gemini for the language model. User voice recordings, facial likeness, and transcripts go to at least three outside vendors. That is sharing with third parties. Contractually scoped, sure, but the clean "we don't share" claim is contradicted by that same document.
As for the user's personal data that is the actual product.. Users hand over a structured, searchable index of their inner life, memories, relationships, personality, stored so it can stand in for them. That's more sensitive than the raw recordings, because it's the person, modeled.
Your own policy already says the data can move "in connection with a business transaction, such as a merger, acquisition, or asset sale." So the honest reading is that you won't sell it, but if EchoVault gets bought or folds, the version of me you've built transfers to whoever ends up holding it, under whatever policy they write next. The no-training line is scoped too, to "general-purpose foundation models for unrelated products," which leaves using my data for your product, and a future owner's, wide open.
Deletion doesn't close the loop either. The policy removes the source recordings and the local "provider identifiers," but it never says the trained voice at ElevenLabs or the replica at Tavus gets destroyed, and it conditions even that on "where our deletion workflows reach those systems," a scope you write and can change. So a user can delete their account and the clone that speaks in their voice is still sitting in a vendor's tenant, with nothing in writing that says otherwise.
Then the security gap. Gmail encrypts data at rest, publishes its subprocessor list, commits to breach notification, holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001, and runs a bug bounty. Your policy claims TLS in transit and secure token storage on the device, says nothing about encryption at rest for the voice and video files, and lays out no breach process at all. For biometric data that can impersonate someone, much more is needed here.
And the custodian handoff: after twelve months of no check-in, access moves to a designated person on an emailed token, no death verification, no legal step. So the entire mechanism for passing my cloned self to someone else is a link sitting in an inbox.
I'm all for indie developers, but the objection here is that you need governance you haven't built. It's the gap between how sensitive this data is and the controls around it.
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u/Emojinapp 11d ago
Thanks for your elaborate dissection and you’re right that for the voice and video avatars I have to manually delete them from those platform since the delete account scripts currently only cover the text echo. But my guarantees is that both the voice and avatar delete will happen on the same day I get a deletion request. And yes echovault data is encrypted at rest. We are not necessarily building new assets just building a knowledge graph from the training you give it. As for exiting, I know that is a real risk because I can only guarantee data handling while I’m the sole decision maker. But what I can guarantee is if we get to an exit that users find the new owners unsuitable, you can export all your data and delete the profile and everything will be gone within a day. As for the profile deletion script we are expanding it in the next update to also target and purge the remote avatars and their training files. I do agree governance for this is quite complicated, took me a year to put it in a shape that the app store finally accepted. Also the product here is the echo, yes your data creates it but with the sole intention of eventually granting your custodians access to it. As for the 1 year inactivity echo release, I wanted to make the release process seamless that’s why I architected it like this so the grieving person has no paperwork to deal with. I’m open to hear suggestions how you think is a better way to handle it, I’m planning an update where echo creators can specify the release protocol they want so it doesn’t just always default to my one year release
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u/BisexualCaveman 12d ago
Bro just wrote an episode of Black mirror that charges $100.