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 finds; it does not invent. Ask it about the home your mother grew up in and it brings back what she actually said - the words, and the recording of her saying them. Nothing is ever added to your story that you didn't say.
Penmora can tidy and organise your words; it never invents a detail, fills a gap, or puts words in your mouth. That has a cost, and we accept it: if something was never recorded, Penmora tells you so rather than writing something plausible.
Penmora also offers questions to help a story along - some from a carefully written bank, others drawn from what you have already said and checked, mechanically, so no question ever assumes something you did not say. A question is an invitation, and it is always yours to decline.
Two
No synthetic likeness or voice. Ever.
Penmora can't make you say anything. It will never clone your voice, never generate speech as you, and never build a likeness of you or of anyone in your record - not as a feature, not as an option, not after you are gone.
When your family listens, they hear the actual recording from the actual day.
It is now technically easy to make a finished memoir sound as though the storyteller is reading it aloud. We think that crosses a line, so Penmora will not do it.
Three
The original stays intact
The recording is the permanent original. Everything else - the written version, the search, anything you make later - is built on top of it and can always be traced back to it: every answer points to the exact moment in the audio where the words were said.
The written version is your words as you spoke them, with only the stray "um"s and "er"s tidied away and nothing else changed. Corrections you make are kept alongside what was first heard, so what was actually said is never overwritten.
Four
Private by default
Your stories are shared with no one until you choose otherwise - no public profiles, no feeds, nothing to opt out of. They are stored in UK and EU-based data centres, encrypted on the way there and while they rest.
Penmora staff cannot browse recordings as part of ordinary work, and any narrow operational exception must be approved, kept specific, and logged.
Your stories are never used to train AI without your explicit permission - and never by any company that processes them for us, full stop: every one signs a contract that bars it. A service that won't sign that contract is a service we don't use.
Five
Recommendation-safe
Penmora is built so that the professionals who work with families - a charity caseworker, a care manager, a clinician - could hand it to a family in distress without risking their reputation on it.
That means no urgency tricks, no emotional pressure, and no claims we can't back. If they couldn't comfortably recommend Penmora to a grieving family, the product is wrong - not the test.
Six
Creator control
The storyteller decides. Who hears the stories, who can read them, what is corrected, what is removed, what happens after they are gone - and whether anything made from them, a printed book included, goes ahead at all.
Anything Penmora produces from your recordings is shown to you for approval before it is used. Consent is never assumed, and a choice can always be changed.
Free to leave, always.
One more promise: everything you record is yours to take - the audio, the written versions, all of it, at no cost, whatever you pay or don't pay. Ask us and we will get it to you. Your family's stories are never held hostage. If you ever decide Penmora isn't the place for them, they leave with you.
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.