Principles
Penmora is built around six product principles. We publish them because trust should not depend on vague reassurance. A principle you can read is a principle we can be held to - by families, by partners, and by anyone considering whether Penmora is the right place for a person's life story.
They are not values written after the fact, or promises that sit separately from the product. They are the rules Penmora is being built around: what the AI may do, what it must never do, how recordings are protected, and where control sits.
One
Retrieval-only AI
Penmora can help you find what you have recorded. It can search across transcripts, show you the part of the story that relates to your question, and take you back to the original audio. It does not create a life story beyond the material that exists.
When a question is not answered in the recordings, Penmora says so clearly. It does not guess, infer, or fill the space with something plausible. Every answer has to be grounded in the words that were actually recorded, with a route back to the moment they were said.
If something was never recorded, Penmora will not pretend that it was.
Two
No synthetic likeness or voice. Ever.
Penmora will not clone your voice. It will not generate AI-spoken versions of your recordings. It will not create a simulated version of you, or of anyone you have recorded, in audio, video, image or any other form.
It is now technically possible to make a finished memoir sound as though the storyteller is reading it aloud. Penmora will not do that.
The voice you hear in Penmora is the voice that was recorded. Nothing else is made to sound like the storyteller.
Three
The original stays intact
The original recording is the source of truth. Transcripts are made from what was said and kept as close as possible to how it was said - the pauses, the asides, the false starts, and the way the story actually came out.
Penmora can help you find, organise and return to what has been recorded. It does not quietly smooth your words into prose, fix your grammar, or rewrite your sentences. If you choose to create a tidier version later, the original remains underneath it.
Four
Private by default
Your recordings are yours. They are stored in UK-based data centres, protected in transit and at rest, and not shared with anyone you have not chosen to share them with.
Penmora does not train AI models on your recordings - not our models, not anyone else's. Penmora is being built to Cyber Essentials Plus standards, and we are working toward ISO 27001 certification. Privacy is the default, not a setting you have to find.
Five
Recommendation-safe
Penmora is built so that a hospice nurse, dementia charity or clinician could put it in front of a family without feeling they were taking a reputational risk.
That means no urgency mechanics, no emotional pressure, and no claims the product cannot back. We do not treat private recordings as material to be shared, promoted, or used to keep people engaged. Every page and every feature has to pass the same test: would someone whose work is supporting people through hard times feel comfortable recommending this?
Six
Creator control
The storyteller decides what happens to their recordings. Who hears them, who can read them, what is shared, what is corrected, and what is deleted.
Nothing is shared unless the storyteller chooses to share it. Penmora does not make recordings public by default, or treat sharing as the natural next step. The story belongs to the person who told it, and Penmora's job is to keep their choices at the centre.
If you would like to read further:
the editorial commitments that follow from these principles. This explains what happens to your recordings, what can be edited, what stays untouched, and where the final say sits.
the story behind Penmora: why it exists, why it is being built carefully, and why the product refuses to turn someone's words into something they did not say.
clear answers to the questions people are likely to ask before trusting Penmora with a life story.