The Interviewer Role in Life-Story.AI (How to Be Useful Without Annoying Them)
You signed up as the Interviewer on a Life-Story.AI memoir for your mom, your dad, your grandparent, or someone else who matters. Lisa, their AI biographer, is good at asking general questions. You are the one who knows which questions actually matter. This guide is about how to do that job well, and how to know when you are being more helpful than annoying.
Last tested: May 30, 2026. We re-check Life-Story.AI’s Interviewer flow every 4–6 weeks. If anything in the platform has changed since this was written, email arthur@memoirji.com.
TL;DR
- The Interviewer role is a participant seat in Life-Story.AI. You submit questions to the main author; Lisa keeps asking AI questions alongside yours.
- Author plan ($99) gives 1 Interviewer seat. Family plan ($199) gives up to 9.
- 1 to 3 questions per week is the sweet spot. Less and the role goes dormant. More and you overload the author.
- The highest-value questions are the ones only you could ask. Specific names, specific events, specific years, sensory anchors, objects.
- Avoid questions that are really hidden complaints. Avoid asking about events you were not there for without setup. Avoid putting the author on the spot in front of other family.
- Coordinate with co-Interviewers (on Family plan). A shared doc prevents duplicate questions and lets you cover different life-periods.
- Send your parent a free WhatsApp conversation tool (link at the bottom) in parallel with the Life-Story.AI sessions; they will warm up faster and your questions will land on a more talkative subject.
About this guide
Hi, I’m Arthur Cho. I built Memoirji, a free WhatsApp memoir bot. I am writing this guide as someone who has tested Life-Story.AI’s Interviewer flow, read every public review of the feature, and watched friends try the role with varying degrees of success.
I do not work for Life-Story.AI. They are a small French team in Courbevoie, and they built a genuinely useful product. The Interviewer role in particular is the feature their third-party testers single out as the highest-leverage. But the role comes with no user manual. New Interviewers get invited, log in, see an empty “submit a question” box, and freeze.
This guide is meant to fill that gap. It is written for the sibling, child, or grandchild who said yes to the invite and now wants to be actually good at the job.
How I evaluated the role: I went through the public signup-and-invite flow, read the published participant roles documentation, the Trustpilot reviews that mention the Interviewer (about 4 of the 22 do), and the most detailed third-party tester report from Skywork (whose author specifically called Interviewer the feature that “unearthed forgotten family lore” when their sibling joined). I also tested similar question-submission flows in adjacent platforms to compare.
What the Interviewer role actually is
On Life-Story.AI, a memoir project has several participant roles:
- Author: the person whose life story is being written
- Co-Author: someone with editing rights, who can revise chapter text
- Interviewer: someone who submits personal questions to the queue
- Subscriber: a passive reader who gets updates but does not contribute
The Interviewer role is question-submission only. You log in to your own Interviewer view, type or paste a question, and it gets added to the author’s queue. The next time the author opens the platform, your question appears alongside Lisa’s AI-generated questions. They can answer your question by voice or text. Your question and their answer become part of the memoir text.
That is the entire mechanic. The platform does not automate question quality, suggest improvements, or rank questions. It is a thin pipe between you and the author. The value of the role is entirely a function of the questions you choose to send.
Why this is the most under-used feature
Most buyers activate the Author plan, see “invite a participant,” and skip it because they cannot think of anyone in the moment. Then 3 weeks later they realize Lisa is asking generic questions and the book is becoming a generic book.
The Skywork tester specifically wrote that when their sibling joined as Interviewer, the sibling submitted questions Lisa would “never have asked,” and those questions surfaced memories that had been buried for decades. Trustpilot reviews echo this: the platform’s printed book quality is praised, but the deepest praise is reserved for the question dynamic across multiple participants.
In practice, the Interviewer seat sits empty on most projects. That is the single biggest leak in the typical Life-Story.AI buyer’s outcome.
Claim the seat in week one, not week three
Two failure modes are the most common.
Failure mode 1: nobody is invited. The Author plan includes the seat. It costs nothing extra. The buyer just never invites anyone. The seat sits empty for the whole project.
Failure mode 2: a sibling is invited but never logs in. This happens when the invite arrives via email, gets buried, and the sibling never gets a friendly follow-up. Two weeks later, Lisa has asked 2 questions, the author is mid-flow, and the sibling has not even seen their own login.
The fix is the same for both: claim the seat in week one, set a low-friction cadence in week one, and verify it is being used by the end of week two.
If you are the Interviewer being invited:
- Accept the email within 24 hours
- Log in and submit 1 question on day one. Even a generic question (this is the warm-up).
- Block a 10-minute recurring slot on your calendar (Sunday evening works for most people).
- Tell the author “I’ll submit 1 to 2 questions every Sunday night.”
If you are the Author who needs to invite someone:
- Pick the sibling, child, or grandchild who knew you (or whom you are writing for) during a specific era.
- Send them this guide along with the invite.
- Be explicit about cadence: “Could you submit one question a week before Sunday?”
The 5-question starter pack
The first few questions you submit set the tone. If your starter questions are good, the author engages. If they are generic, the author treats your questions like a homework assignment.
Here is a tested 5-question starter pack to submit in week one. Each question template is followed by a real example so you can see what good looks like.
1. The “specific person” question. Lisa will never know the names that matter to your family. You do.
Template: “Tell me about [specific person] and what they meant to you.” Example: “Tell me about Aunt Margaret. I remember her always making fudge at Christmas, but I never asked you what she was like growing up.”
2. The “specific place” question. A childhood home, a vacation spot, a hospital room, a workplace.
Template: “What do you remember about [specific place]?” Example: “What do you remember about the apartment on Edgemont Avenue? I was too young to remember much of it.”
3. The “sensory anchor” question. Memories are encoded with the senses. A smell, a sound, a food, a song.
Template: “What does [specific smell, sound, or food] make you think of?” Example: “What does the smell of pine cleaner remind you of? I always think of Grandpa’s house.”
4. The “object” question. Pick an object the author owns and has had for decades.
Template: “Where did [specific object] come from, and why have you kept it?” Example: “Where did the brass clock on the mantel come from? It’s been there my whole life.”
5. The “in their words” question. Quote something the author actually says, and ask where it came from.
Template: “You always say [quoted phrase]. Where did that come from?” Example: “You always say ‘measure twice, cut once.’ Where did you first hear that?”
These 5 questions in the first 2 weeks will produce more memoir-worthy material than 6 weeks of Lisa’s generic prompts. Save them, modify them, reuse the templates for the next round.
For a deeper exploration of how to ask good memoir questions (including 100+ examples), our guide to interviewing elderly parents about their life stories goes much further. If you want AI-generated question prompts to mix with your personal ones, our ChatGPT prompts for interviewing parents post has a curated set you can adapt.
Cadence: how often should you actually submit?
The pattern that works in practice: 1 question tied to that week’s Lisa topic, plus 1 question on a topic Lisa would not reach.
Lisa sends one question per week. When you see the author has answered it (you can see this in the project view), look at what they said. Then submit a follow-up that takes their answer one layer deeper.
For example, if Lisa asked “Tell me about your first job” and the author answered with a 3-minute voice memo about working as a hospital orderly in 1967, your follow-up could be: “You mentioned Dr. Carmody in passing. Who was he, and why do you still remember his name?”
That is a question Lisa cannot ask, because Lisa does not know Dr. Carmody is interesting. You know.
The second weekly question is for a topic you want covered that Lisa will not reach in the natural flow. If the memoir is drifting toward childhood and you want to make sure adult professional life gets covered too, submit a question to nudge it: “Tell me about the year you went freelance. What changed in our family during that year?”
Total ask: 2 questions a week, about 10 minutes of your time, every Sunday evening.
If you submit more than 3 questions in a week, you overload the author. They feel like they have homework. They start skipping. You become a stressor instead of a contributor.
The line between useful and annoying
This is the part of the role most new Interviewers do not get right.
Useful questions:
- Are specific (names, dates, places, objects)
- Open with “tell me about” or “what do you remember about”
- Land on topics the author has agency over
- Can be answered in 2 to 5 minutes
- Get followed up only after the author has had a chance to answer the previous one
Annoying questions:
- Are corrections in disguise (“Don’t you remember that you actually did X, not Y?”)
- Force an opinion on a contentious topic
- Are really complaints (“Why did you never come to my soccer games?”)
- Cover events you were not there for, without giving the author room to frame
- Pile up before the author has responded to the previous one
The Interviewer role is not a courtroom. You are not there to extract a confession or correct the record. You are there to draw out memories that would otherwise be lost. If a memory is uncomfortable for the author to share, the memoir is not the place to force it.
A useful self-check before submitting any question: “If my parent declined to answer this, would I be okay with that?” If the answer is no, the question is wrong for the Interviewer role. Have that conversation in person, not through Lisa.
Coordinating with siblings (the Family plan)
If you bought the Family plan ($199), you can invite up to 9 Interviewers. This is great for big families. It is also the easiest way to flood the author with 20 questions in week 3 and watch them give up.
If you have multiple Interviewers:
- Divide by life-period. Sibling A covers childhood (asks about grandparents, first home, school). Sibling B covers early adulthood (college, first job, dating). Cousin C covers parenting and family-formation years.
- Use a shared doc outside the platform (Google Doc, Notion, whatever) to coordinate. The platform does not show you what other Interviewers have already asked. Before you submit, check the shared doc.
- Cap total weekly questions at 5. Even with 4 Interviewers active, the author should not see more than 5 new human questions per week. Set a “1 per Interviewer per week” rule and stick to it.
- Rotate the lead role. Each month, a different Interviewer is the primary. The others stay quiet that month unless invited in.
This kind of coordination is unglamorous and most families do not do it. Doing it is the difference between a memoir that holds together and a memoir that collapses under question overload.
When NOT to be the Interviewer
A few honest cases where you should decline the role:
- You have unresolved conflicts with the author. A memoir is not the right venue for working through old grievances. If the question you most want to ask is “why did you” and not “tell me about,” step back.
- You do not have 10 minutes a week, every week, for 10 weeks. It is better to be honest with the author than to claim the seat and let it go cold. An empty seat does not hurt the memoir; an absent Interviewer who promised to participate does.
- You are geographically and emotionally distant from the author. The Interviewer role works best when you knew the author through a specific era. If you have only known them as an adult, in adult roles, you may not have the questions that surface childhood memories. Consider asking another family member to take the seat instead.
Bridging the weekly gap (where Memoirji fits)
This is the honest pitch. The Life-Story.AI weekly cadence is intentional and good for the printed book outcome. But there is a structural gap: the author has 6 days between Lisa’s questions in which they are not engaging with the memoir at all.
In that gap, memories surface and disappear. The author thinks of a story at the dinner table on Wednesday, has nobody to tell it to, and by the time Lisa’s next question lands on Sunday, the story is gone.
Memoirji is a free WhatsApp memoir bot we built specifically for this kind of unstructured daily storytelling. The author sends voice or text messages whenever a memory surfaces, the bot captures them, and you (as the Interviewer) can review the captured content at the end of each week. Then when you submit your weekly question to Life-Story.AI, you are submitting one informed by what your parent already mentioned in passing earlier in the week.
The two tools layer cleanly: Memoirji captures the raw stream of memories in between sessions, and Lisa stitches the polished book at the end. You become a much better Interviewer because you have visibility into what is on the author’s mind.
For more on why voice tends to work better than typing, especially with older adults, our existing guide on voice messages vs writing for senior memoirists goes deep on this.
When Memoirji is also not the answer
In the spirit of honest advice: if your author is uncomfortable with voice memos and prefers a slow weekly cadence with time to think, do not pile on a daily WhatsApp bot. Some authors thrive on structure and pressure-free deadlines. For those people, Life-Story.AI alone is the right setup, and your job as Interviewer is to send 2 great questions a week.
The warm-up tool is for authors who would benefit from a higher-frequency, lower-stakes channel. You will know which type your author is within the first week.
Want to be the best Interviewer they could ask for?
Send your author the free Memoirji WhatsApp link so they can capture daily memories in between Lisa’s weekly questions. Then you submit Interviewer questions informed by what they shared. Same voice-or-text format as Life-Story.AI, no commitment, no subscription.
Related guides
- Life-Story.AI Setup Guide for 2026 (What to Do in Week One): the broader week-one setup playbook this guide pairs with.
- How to Interview Elderly Parents About Their Life Stories: a much deeper field guide on interview technique, with 100+ question examples.
- ChatGPT Prompts for Interviewing Parents: a curated set of AI-generated prompts you can adapt and submit as Interviewer questions.
- Voice Messages vs Writing for Senior Memoirists: why voice usually wins, and how to coach a parent into their first recording.