Before the great AI robot war ala the Terminator movie science fiction series, we are witnessing in 2025, the opening stages of The Great AI Story Book War.  This is a foreshadowing of how consumer focused, internet based, AI powered services will battle each other for marketshare.

The Incumbent

Storyworth is the incumbent, having filled my Facebook and Instagram feed over the past five years with advertising, first using static posts, to rich, emotion-filled video, use of influencers and advertising using earned and paid media (articles in CNN, etc).  The founder of Storyworth would sit with his father and talk about how he started the service, and his adorable father would glance at him in what seemed like agreement.  This is textbook advertising for senior services, as someone who worked in senior living for over a decade, meant to draw in the attention of the adult child caregiver, usually the daughter but also the guys too.

The Storyworth service, roughly costing around $100 per year, is low touch, meaning is entirely automated from the Storyworth perspective, and requires the client, usually an older person, to answer emailed questions once a week for about a year.  The primary decision maker (the buyer) is usually an adult child looking to have a memoir of their parent.  For years, they were pretty much the only game in town in the low touch category.  There are higher touch professional book/memoir services that can cost thousands of dollars and for really finished, elegant product, and Storyworth serviced the market for low/lower touch.  The client (or their adult child) had to still edit the book and do a lot of heavy lifting.  Because the book writing, editing and making process is likely to take longer than a year, the costs could be over $200.

When we created MemoryVideo.com in 2021, we wanted to help people get the entire process done in about one hour, as opposed to a year or more of writing and editing.  Our technological tools were Zoom for virtual communications and AI powered transcription services to generate transcripts of the videos.  Typically, and depending on how fast someone speaks, an one hour interview generated between 15 to 20 pages of transcript in a Word document.

Enter AI & The Better Mousetrap

In 2025, new entrants appeared.  Fresh off of the technological leap of consumer-oriented AI, and the ability to solve an issue faced by some of Storyworth’s clients: that responding to weekly emails was a lot of work for a client most likely in advanced age.  The comment section of Storyworth on Facebook would sometimes include requests for voice recording in lieu of writing.  Remento seemed to solve that issue, with its voice recording feature that AI transcribes into written text (much like how we first envisioned MemoryVideo in 2021).  Couple that with a brilliant launch with an appearance on Shark Tank (while Mark Cuban is still on there), and featuring what seemed like a teary-eyed Kevin O’Leary embracing the service, Remento had hit it off with a bang; mirroring the Storyworth playbook for Facebook and IG advertising.

Now, both Storyworth and Remento ads appear one after the other on my social media feeds.  I can only imagine how much this is costing them.  Facebook ads generally range from $0.50 to $2.00 per click (CPC), or $5 to $15 per 1,000 impressions (CPM), and the likely number of targets must be in the millions to tens of millions, each day.

In addition to Remento, I’ve been seeing other AI book makers including those that create books from your social media photo postings.  The AI story book war has begun and I predict is just the opening act.

As someone, with no advertising for MemoryVideo.com learned, for mass appeal attention, you have to pay to play.  Some products had early traction with viral posts, such as Turning Heart’s grave/cemetery QR code – I had friends share those with me their posts of videos of older people now deceased .  And, I’ve seen them experience competition as well with companies like Memorygram, which seems to be dipping its toes in a bunch of categories (books, medallions, professional book making).

And then, there are the foreign based companies, that also advertise mainly on Google search.  As a practitioner in the field, I observed a playbook of early marketing with very friendly reviews on Trustpilot (most occurring within a day or two of each other) and a soft launch on producthunt.com (Remento did that because an internet entrepreneur friend immediately forwarded that to me).

Analysis

My prediction is barriers to entry are falling.  However, in order to reach escape velocity (standing out in a crowded field), and really make a mark, lot’s and lot’s of advertising dollars must be spent and aided by earned media.  That is a bit disheartening especially for the start up founders motivated by the social mission of preserving parents and grandparents’ stories.  However, the market is very big and in a future article, I’ll try to define and quantify.  The coming digital immortality wave is just starting, and we are seeing the first major war between well resourced, consumer, AI powered services in this industry.

I also predict that Storyworth, Remento, Memorygram, and others are going to spend the big bucks to make the digital immortality industry more mainstream.  This is really uplifting, especially for services that are higher touch but still affordable (like MemoryVideo.com which uses human interviewers but also costs less than $100 and is a lot faster to create).  The beauty of AI is cost saving and value enhancing (getting more for your buck).  And, AI will be even more impactful for the middle touch providers like MemoryVideo.com, where this is a gamechanger technology.  Watch for services that were previously economically infeasible become feasible with AI.

About the Author

Kyle Oura is the founder of Digitalimmortality.com, the consumer guide and industry and career resource for the digital immortality industry.  He is obsessed with preserving the memories of people, especially older people, having lost both his parents early in life and working in and starting companies in the senior living industry – a field he was interested in since college as a social science and business student.  Digital immortality is an emerging movement, technology, industry and part of human evolution that will change how everyone views their contribution to the world and their future descendants.  Please follow our website and join our mailing list for future insights.  If you are interested in becoming “digital immortality ready,” please visit that section of our site.  Thank you for reading.