A muhabet is a long, warm talk
Tell them what your life was like at nine. They hear it when they turn nine.
Muhabet is an iPhone app for recording short stories in your own voice for a child. Each one waits on their shelf and opens at its time.
A book for every year
Each child has a shelf, and every year of their life is a book on it, from the day they were born to eighteen and on.
- In their colourSomething is inside, and they can hear it now.
- Wrapped in paperSomething is inside, sealed until that birthday.
- An outlineNothing yet. It's waiting for you.
Sealed means it waits for the child. On your own phone you can always play what you recorded.
You, at their age
Muhabet asks one small thing at a time. Where did you live? Who was your best friend? What were your jobs around the home? You answer out loud, for a few minutes.
What you say about being nine waits in the book for nine.
More than one child? One recording is enough. Each of them hears it on their own ninth birthday.
The morning it opens
On the birthday, the year's book comes out of its paper, and you listen together.
Today you're seven. So was Dad, once.
Not only birthdays
- A moment
- The day they were born, a first day of school, leaving home, a wedding day. A memory can be heard at once. Words for a day still to come open when you say it has happened.
- A feeling
- For when they're sad, or scared, or can't sleep. There whenever it's needed.
- Today
- Something they just said, before you forget it.
- Their own voice
- A few questions you read to them, asked again each year, so one day they can hear themselves grow up.
Whoever loves them
A grandparent takes your phone, picks their own name and talks. Everyone who speaks has a colour, so a book shows who has left something in it.
Yours to keep
- Everything can be saved as ordinary audio files, a folder for each child, whenever you like.
- Each story is written down as a transcript, so it can be read as well as heard.
- Only real recordings. Nothing is generated, and no voice is imitated.