Someone recently shared proportional time theory with me: Days feel shorter as you get older because each day represents a smaller fraction of your entire life.
I immediately reflected on how summers felt as a child vs. now, or how some periods in my life feel more vivid than others, mostly because of what was going on at the time. But I absolutely believe the mathematical equation between actual time and amount of time lived nudges us to reflect more on our own evolution.
Thinking about this was how I ended up finding Memairy, a digital memory diary that uses artificial intelligence to reflect the emotional core of your personal uploads, whether text, photos or videos. AI helps the journaling tool analyze your entries and recognize emotions, sentiment and even the people in your uploads. This helps find emotional patterns and cues, and is automatic, so there's no tagging involved or required.
Memairy was founded in 2019 by Jim Chonko as a personal, AI-powered memory and diary service (not to be confused with the productivity tool Mem.ai). It was created as a gentle antidote to the performative nature of social media, aiming instead to help people privately reflect on their emotional lives and preserve meaningful videos and pictures.
According to Chonko, the goal has always been to "understand, not optimize," using AI to support emotional well-being rather than manipulate it.
Memairy uses AI to categorize content and detect objects in photos and videos, much like Google Photos and Apple Intelligence do, but it also uses its pattern recognition capabilities to find tones and themes throughout your uploads and preserve loved ones' life stories.
AI supports the product in a few different ways. First, "emotion detection," which sees the AI tool analyze and label your memory with a certain emotion. This applies to anything you write and upload, too. Choko confirmed that while Memairy doesn't give you the ability to manually retag things, by adding a more complete context to the entry, you can better understand and process your emotions. (For anyone curious, this technique is called sentiment analysis, and is often used by businesses to learn customer behavior. Memairy has applied this same technique in a much more intimate, wholesome, setting.)
Next, AI uses natural language processing to read your journal entry and extract key indicators, like people, places, events and topics, and transforms it into categorized memories without you having to tag anything.
It also can create a timeline of your emotional life to help you spot periods where you were feeling a certain way, and why that may be, with a focus on your evolution over time. This does require you to be consistently uploading, though.
Chonko says that "AI thrives when given richer context." For example, Chonko explains that providing detailed journal entries allows the AI's sentiment analysis models to detect and highlight recurring emotional themes and patterns, helping people gain deeper insights into their emotional well-being.
These insights stay entirely private. All analysis is done through Memairy's own secure system, with no ads, data sharing or off-platform processing. It's one of the few AI tools that doesn't treat user data as a commodity, which I'd say is rare in today's tech landscape.
In short, Memairy applies emotional intelligence mixed with memory recognition while pattern insight works quietly behind the scenes to provide insight on your inner life, all through your private visual journal.
Using Memairy doesn't take much work, and regardless of the subscription model, you can access it for 30 days free.
1. Head to Memairy's website and click Sign Up. You can stay on a free 30-day plan, or upgrade to a plan for $1/month. (I couldn't find a pricing page, but this information was noted on Memairy's FAQs.)
2. Log in and click around -- this space has become your diary. It's private and its AI-enhanced interface will auto-categorize entries and extract key details. There are three entry types: text, photo and video.
3. You can view each entry on a timeline, where you scroll past memories chronologically. Here, AI steps in to help filter by mood, people, places or topics. This automatic categorization helps you by removing the need to manually tag anything. As a reminder, though, you can't manually retag an emotion -- even more important to note if you haven't uploaded much to Memairy. Tags get more accurate the more content there is for it to "read."
4. Next, you can use AI for analysis and visualization to help reflect on trends or experiences over time. This includes object/person detection (let's say, for a family tree) or the emotional tone behind your uploads, like words, images, speech and colors. This is a really cool way to use AI as a creative right hand without generating anything. Instead, it's intuiting your information and reflecting emotional patterns back to you.
Another interesting way to access Memairy is through its blog. While it hasn't been updated in a bit, there's some really interesting takes on AI and memory that are worth checking out -- maybe they inspire your memory diary?
If you're seeking clarity, emotional depth or simply a private space to process life, Memairy might be exactly what you need. Memairy prides itself on being a free tool that doesn't sell your data, which I can respect and appreciate -- and its functionality is straightforward. While it doesn't sell your data, though, there's always the risk of data breaches happening, so be wary about the personal or private information you feed the AI tool.
Chonko also shared what's ahead for Memairy, which may be a reason to try the platform out, or stick around to see how it evolves over time. "I am currently working on a conversational AI-powered personal biographer," he said. This will allow multiple people to share stories of loved ones and create a memoir of that person, even if they're already deceased.
I think Memairy is a solid choice for avid journalers who want to have support in tagging and naming what they're working through. I'd offer this as an excellent resource for therapy clients, those processing griefs or even tracking creativity, fertility and mental health cycles.
If you're a deeply feeling person, overthinker, introvert or someone who just wants somewhere to put the emotions churning -- and sometimes burning -- inside of you, Memairy gives you that insight and analysis without judgment.
Though, like anything else, consistency will be the key for Memairy to actually work. So if that doesn't sound like you, maybe this is a good challenge to start placing your feelings in a digital container and navigate your inner world in order to share it with yourself... and then a private memory diary platform.
