Tellus
Kente Labs Limited · Writing · Voice & Language
Tellus is a voice recording memoir app that turns spoken family stories into a written memoir and an illustrated children's book. You record your parents' or grandparents' memories with one button, and the AI memoir writer handles transcription, writing, and layout. It fits families who want to preserve a life story without asking anyone to type. Not one word.
About Tellus
What Is Tellus
Tellus is a family history app built around voice, not writing. Parents and grandparents talk, and the software turns those recordings into a coherent memoir plus a storybook their grandchildren can read. That's the whole pitch, and it's a good one if the people you want to interview hate sitting down with a keyboard and would rather just tell you about their life out loud while the recorder listens. The appeal is simple: you record grandparents stories by letting them speak.
Most people mean to capture this stuff and never get around to it. A blank page stops them. Turns out a microphone doesn't.
The app handles 95+ languages and keeps the speaker's own words and accent intact rather than flattening everyone into the same generic voice that loses the personal texture people are trying to save in the first place. Kente Labs Limited runs it, and the company leans on privacy as a selling point since the material is personal by nature.
The catch is scope. Tellus writes and illustrates; it doesn't print and mail a hardcover for you, and the fancier storybook output sits behind the paid tier. Expect to do a little editing yourself before anything feels finished.
So who is it for? Anyone with a relative who has stories worth saving and no patience for writing them down.
Getting Started
- Sign up at the Tellus website and create a family account.
- Invite a parent or grandparent by sending them a recording request to record family stories.
- Have them tap record and talk about a memory, a place, or a person from their life.
- Let the AI transcribe the audio and draft it into a memoir chapter.
- Review the draft and turn the audio to memoir prose you can edit, then generate an illustrated storybook when you're ready.
Product Information
A quick look at Tellus's pricing, supported platforms, and performance.
Best for
The users, tasks, and scenarios where this tool fits best.
Users
- Adult children who want their parents' stories on record before it's too late
- Grandparents with a lifetime of memories and little patience for typing
- Families spread across countries and languages
Tasks
- Turning scattered voice memos into a readable memoir
- Building a children's book about a grandparent
- Preserving a voice, not just facts
Scenarios
- A holiday visit where you finally sit down and record a few hours of stories.
- A long-distance setup where relatives record on their own schedule and you collect the chapters remotely.
- A milestone gift, such as a retirement or a 70th birthday, built around a finished memoir.
Key features
One-Button Voice Recording
The core interaction is a record button, nothing more. You don't write prompts or fill out questionnaires; the person just talks, and Tellus takes over from there. For older relatives who freeze up in front of a form, that single step is the difference between a finished project and one that never gets started. No prompts. No forms. Just talk.
AI Transcription That Keeps the Speaker's Voice
Tellus transcribes recordings and drafts them into memoir prose while holding onto the speaker's authentic words and accent. It's not trying to sound like a novelist. The goal is a story that still reads like the person who told it. That matters when the whole point is remembering how someone actually talked, in their own accent and phrasing. A generic voice loses the thing you were trying to keep.
Illustrated Children's Books
Beyond the memoir, Tellus turns family history into an illustrated storybook pitched at kids. The paid plan includes storybook tokens, so you can produce multiple versions or update the book as new stories come in, and the same recordings that built the memoir feed straight into a version a five-year-old can follow along with. It's the feature most people don't expect from a memoir app, and it's the one that gets grandchildren involved.
95+ Language Support
Tellus handles more than 95 languages, which is unusually wide for this category. A grandmother can tell her story in her first language while the rest of the family reads it in theirs. For immigrant families, that alone justifies the app. Grandma talks in Vietnamese; the grandkids read in English. Same story, two generations.
Shared Family Recording
You can request stories from relatives and let several people contribute, not just one narrator. A memoir can grow from multiple voices across a family, and the free plan already allows recording requests and basic sharing, so a sibling in another city can add their own memories to the same book. The paid tier unlocks all the stories instead of just the first few.
Free Tier With Unlimited Recording
Recording and AI transcription are free, with no cap on how many memories you capture. You only pay when you want the polished memoir and storybook output. That split lets a family test the workflow before committing. Rare in this space, where most rivals push a subscription before you've recorded anything.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Recording and transcription are free with no limit, so families can try it before spending anything.
- One-time $69.99 lifetime price beats the subscription model most rival memoir apps use.
- 95+ language support keeps non-English-speaking relatives in the loop.
- Illustrated storybooks give the output a second audience: grandchildren, not just adults.
Cons
- Storybook generation and full story unlocking sit behind the $69.99 paywall, so the free tier is really a trial for the finished product.
- There's no printing or shipping, so a physical hardcover still means exporting the book and handling it elsewhere.
- It's web only, so there's no dedicated mobile app for relatives who'd rather record from a phone app.
Frequently asked questions
It records spoken family stories and turns them into a written memoir plus an illustrated children's book. You capture audio, and the AI handles transcription and writing, so nobody has to type.
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