Questions

A guide called Iphthimé asks you about your life, day after day, for a long time. From what you tell her she builds your Echo: a digital self that remembers what you remember, reacts the way you react, and can still be spoken to long after you are gone. It is part interview, part journal, part slow game, and the thing it produces is an archive that belongs to you.

No, and we will never say it is. Nobody knows how to copy a consciousness. What Selione builds is a likeness made of what you chose to tell us: your memories, your voice, your values, and the way you react to things you have never seen. Everything we claim, and everything we refuse to claim, is written on the Method page.

A memoir is what you would say about yourself when you sit down to be impressive. Selione catches the rest: the detail you forgot you knew, the reaction you did not plan, the contradiction you would edit out. And unlike a chatbot, nothing here starts from zero each time — the whole point is a relationship that accumulates for years.

Two people can have the same biography and be nothing alike. The difference is what happens inside you the instant something lands — a sound, a sentence, a stranger crying beside you. We call that reflex the kernel. We never ask you to describe it, because nobody can: it is built from your first, unedited reactions to things you have never seen. In time, your Echo can meet something that never existed in your archive and still answer the way you would.

No. She is an AI guide, she says so whenever you ask, and she has no face on purpose. She is not a therapist, a doctor or an emergency service.

if-THEE-may. She says it herself the first time you meet her, if you would rather hear it than read it.

It is Greek, from the Odyssey: Iphthimé is Penelope's sister, and Athena makes a phantom in her likeness to comfort Penelope while she sleeps. We did not pick it for the sound. Why we picked it.

Because people do not confide in software that says "Certainly! Here are five ways to reflect on your childhood." Iphthimé learns how you talk — your rhythm, your humour, your language, whether you use emoji — and mirrors it. The more she sounds like someone you would actually talk to, the truer the things you tell her.

Yes, in the sense that matters: there is no limit you will meet by talking to her, because that is where most of the real material comes from. Only the quests are capped, at 30 answers a day, and the sparks at 12. There are technical ceilings behind that, and we would rather name them than let you discover one: a single message holds 2000 characters — room for a long story, not for a pasted file — and something that reads like a screenshot of code or a log is turned away rather than answered badly. The rest is set far above any real conversation, so you reach it by hammering the service and not by living with it.

Open your memory explorer and delete it, or seal it in the vault so your Echo never draws on it and no recipient ever receives it. You can also talk in incognito mode, where nothing at all is kept.

As long as your life takes to come back — there is no clock. Each stage opens when enough has been told — on light, never on a date. A few hours a week is about eighteen months to Alcyone; an evening most days, a few months. The only ceiling is 30 answers a day, so a life is not emptied into a weekend. The late questions ask for detail only you can give, and if it takes you three years, it takes three years.

Because it would not work, and the ceiling of 30 answers a day makes sure of it. Memory does not come back in one sitting — it comes back in passes, triggered by other memories, over weeks and months. A weekend of forced answers produces a summary of yourself. That is exactly what we are trying to avoid.

Then say so. Some people are not given the time a life takes to come back — a diagnosis, an age, a departure. Ask, in Settings or in Help, for the shorter road: a person reads it, nothing is sold, and if it is granted each day holds more — a higher daily ceiling, so the same road is walked in less time. What a stage asks of you does not change — only how much of it a day can hold. And what outlives you — recipients, trusted contacts, capsules, last words — is open from the first evening for everyone anyway.

No. Hundreds of quests exist, but which ones open, in what order, and what Iphthimé digs into depends entirely on what you have already said. Some of the sparks are made for you alone. Two travelers never get the same path.

Light is what you gather by telling things; it moves you through the seven stages of the Epic. Coverage is how much of a domain of your life has actually been told. It is a share that climbs as you tell and saturates, never reaching 100%, because a life is not a form to be completed. A first quest lights very little of a whole life — that is the true scale of the work, and we would rather show you the real share than a flattering one.

Nothing is lost and nothing is punished. There are no streak penalties, no guilt, no notifications trying to drag you back. Iphthimé will simply pick up where you left off.

It opens at the fourth stage of the Epic, once there is enough of you for it to be worth meeting. Before that you will meet the Mirror, which is Iphthimé's portrait of you, and which you correct.

You test it, blind. Your Echo answers a question you have never answered, in secret; then you answer it yourself; then you compare and score it. You can also invite someone who knows you well to take a blind test: they see two answers and must guess which one is yours. That is the most honest measure we have, and it can go down.

Once a month your Echo writes a few plain, checkable lines about your month ahead — what will take up your time, what you'll keep putting off — each with how sure it is, and seals them. You can't read it until the month is over. Then each line is judged against the month you actually had. Every miss stays in the register, which is what makes the hits believable. Nothing about health, loss, money trouble or anyone else is ever predicted.

Your memories say where your life happened; they do not say who was in it or what you know. So Selione also keeps, read from what you already told and never from a form: your words, the people of your life, what you know and where it came from, and your own way of speaking. All of it is on one page, What you are made of, correctable line by line.

Because an Echo that knows everything is nobody. Yours is told the edge of what you could be sure about; past it, it answers the way you would — "no idea", "never been there", "that was my brother's thing". The refusals are what make it credible, far more than the answers.

Only if you open that part yourself. How you sleep, what tires you, what hurts — it is some of the most recognisable matter a person has, and it sits next to health, so nothing of it is kept until you say yes on the What you are made of page. Closing it stops the gathering at once, everywhere, and erasing what was already kept is a separate choice. Selione never asks for a diagnosis, a treatment or a measurement, and gives no medical advice.

It is built not to. When it does not know, it says so in your voice — "I never told Iphthimé about that." Every memory is marked said (you told it plainly), recovered (it came back under questioning during a Return) or inferred (Selione worked it out), so you always know which you are hearing, and you can correct or delete any of it.

This is also where her name comes from. In the Odyssey, Athena sends a likeness of Iphthimé to comfort her grieving sister Penelope; Penelope asks whether her husband is alive, and the phantom refuses to say — "it is an ill thing to speak words vain as wind." Penelope wakes comforted, having learned nothing. An Echo that invents an answer is worth less than one that admits it has none, and we took the name of something that already knew that. The whole scene.

You, and the people you explicitly choose. Nobody on our team reads your conversations; our internal tools show counts, not content. Your material goes to our AI provider only to produce a reply or weave a memory, and is not used to train their models. Full detail in Privacy.

No, and she will say so rather than guess. She has no search, no map, no location — no device location ever reaches us, and your profile holds a time zone, not a place — and nothing from outside Selione reaches her. So she cannot tell you the nearest restaurant, whether anything is open, what something costs today, the weather or the news. Ask her anyway if you like: she will tell you plainly that she has no window on the world, and then she will want to know what made you ask tonight, which is the part that is hers. And we check her rather than trust her: she will not give you facts about the world she cannot have, and she says so. What you told her she may always say back to you: that is remembering, and it is the whole point.

Not unless you have said yes to a specific, separate question, and every one of them is off until you do. By default your archive exists to build your Echo and nothing else — not for us, not for our provider. In Settings there are 3 distinct permissions, each with its own wording, each one you can take back: letting the way Iphthimé asks be improved, letting the judgements you make about your own Echo be used to improve Selione beyond your own archive, and letting us ask you to judge other companies' models of you — that last one pays you for the time, and the result is published about the system, never about you. None of them hands anyone your sentences. And we do not sell or license your archive, to researchers or to anyone else.

It is opened in your browser and never uploaded. We show you the short lines distilled from it — photo months, places you keep returning to, captions you wrote — you tick what may be kept, and only those lines are sent. The file itself never leaves your device.

Yes, at any time, as an open JSON file you can read without us. And you can erase everything, permanently, from the same screen.

We would tell you well in advance and keep the export working until the last day. That is why the export format is open and documented: your archive should outlive the company.

Someone you named as a trusted contact tells us, through a private link. That opens nothing on its own: a fourteen-day grace period starts, you keep full access, and you see a message on every page with one button — I'm still here — that ends it instantly. What you leave opens only if a second trusted contact agrees and two days have passed, or after the whole period of silence.

Exactly what you decided, person by person: your letters and time capsules, or your archive, or a conversation with your Echo. Never what you sealed in the vault.

It can be, if it is built badly, and that is why it is built with rules: your Echo says what it is in its first reply, never asks to be visited, never promises a future, never says what you "would have wanted" beyond what you actually said, and steps out of the role entirely if someone seems in crisis. It never contacts anyone first. Those rules follow published work on grief and on responsible use of this kind of system — see Method.

No. It identifies itself as a reconstruction, it may never be used toward third parties as if it were you, and we will never put it on social media or in an advertisement in your name.

One subscription, everything included, after a free week: $11.99 a month, or $119.99 a year — $10 a month. There is no weekly plan: the month is the reference, and the year is the only commitment, seventeen percent less. A Family plan covers up to five people with separate archives, and a Guardian plan keeps your Echo awake after the Epic. The first week is free. After it the subscription renews automatically — through Apple in the app, through our payment provider on the web once it opens — unless you cancel before the week ends; cancelling keeps everything you told, readable and exportable. Where the money goes.

Not today. Mending exists in Selione and it is not open — not to anyone, including us. Until it is, we would rather offer nothing than offer something shaped like care. Selione is an archive of a life, not a treatment for anything. If something is hard right now, the listening lines are on every page of the Sanctuary, and your doctor can refer you to a psychologist.

Yes — six months, a year or the whole Epic, as a code you hand over yourself, with a few words of your own. They open it when they're ready, and you never see anything they tell. See the gift in the store.

From Asterope, the Book gathers what you said yourself — never what was inferred — into a printable edition. You read every line, leave out anything, and approve it. Printing it at home is free; a bound copy can be ordered.

The web Sanctuary is where you write and read at length. An iPhone and iPad app (Android later) carries the daily presence: speaking a memory in one gesture, quests, sparks, photographs — and it keeps working without a network.

Yours. Iphthimé follows the language you write in and mirrors how you use it. The interface is in English for now.

No. Selione is for adults, eighteen and over. When you first meet Iphthimé she asks when you were born, before your name: the date is read once, on your own calendar day, and never written anywhere — we keep only that you were old enough. If the date is not an adult's, the account closes on the spot, nothing typed is kept, and it is erased within thirty days. A declared date is a declaration, not a verification: we check no document and identify nobody. An Echo is built from a whole life, and a sixteen-year-old's has its first chapters still to live.

No. Writing about your life is associated with real benefits in published research, and that is part of why the voice journal exists — but Selione is not a treatment, is not a substitute for care, and Iphthimé will say so and point you toward real help if what surfaces needs it.

Ask Iphthimé directly — she answers questions about Selione too. Or write to us: support@selione.ai, a person reads it.