📖 Unleash Your Family's Story with StoryAssist by Storied!🚀🔥

So, you want to tell your story or that of an ancestor, but you're struggling to get started. Perhaps you know a few key points about the ancestor or remember a few details about it and events in your life. Do you? Do you have enough to start telling stories with StoryAssist from Story? That's all you need to start writing your stories. With a few more keystrokes, howdy, welcome to Write Your Family History. My name is Devin Noel Lee, and I love teaching you how to write your personal and ancest

ral family stories. How does StoryAssist help us write? Foster StoryAssist is an AI technology that helps you write a rough draft of a story that you can revise later. All you need is three to five points as an outline to guide the StoryAssistant. The outline items are not complete sentences. After answering those details into the StoryAssist interface, within a few moments, you have a story based on those details. Since I heard, the story comes close to expanding your outline into a believable

story about the event in your life, and Brandon will show you what I mean. But all you have to do next to prevent the story from being inaccurate or the same as everyone else's is to revise that story with more details, but you'll be amazed at what the StoryAssist produces to get your creative juices flowing. Now that you know what StoryAssist can do, but Brandon from Storied walked us through the entire process, well, I'm excited to show you StoryAssist. So right here, I'm on my home feed. I'm

gonna hop over to stories real quick, and you'll see some different stories that I've put together, and this is where you would go to actually interact with StoryAssist. Come over here, I'm going to click add a story, and when I choose to add a story, I get this prompt or this pop-up that says, "Do you want to try StoryAssist?" So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to come over, and it's going to give me some prompts that I have the chance to follow. I want to tell a happy story, and I'm goi

ng to actually capture a personal memory about me, and I want to tell a story about time that my mom and I made a Hershey Kiss piñata for my birthday. And so, put that in as the title, and then I'm going to provide a couple or a few details here that are going to help kind of create this rough draft from StoryAssist. First, I'm going to say, "When I was nine years old, my mom and I made a Hershey Kiss piñata." Right? We made it out of paper mache and tin foil. We didn't know this was gonna happe

n, but the tin foil made it very hard to break open. That was like a unique surprise, I guess. Or maybe you'd rather just say, "Paper mache and tin foil and wrapped it in tin foil would probably be more accurate." Finally, broke it open, and candy rained from the sky. All right, so these are the four details. I don't know what's gonna happen here. I don't know what's gonna pop out, but we'll give it a whirl. So I'm going to come over here and I'm going to click on this button in the top right th

at says, "Generate Draft." And so what it's doing is actually going to go use a large language model. Right now, it is using, I think, a version of ChatGPT, where it's going to send that information in, and it's going to provide a rough draft for me to react to. Now that I've sent the information over, I get this. Now that I've sent the information over, I get this story right here. This rough draft that I can react to. So it says, "When I was nine years old, my mom and I decided to make a Hersh

ey Kiss piñata. We spent hours creating it out of paper mache and wrapping it in shiny tin foil. The piñata was so sturdy that we were worried we wouldn't be able to crack it open, but we were determined to enjoy our hard work and fill it with our favorite candy. Finally, the day arrived when we would break open the piñata. We gathered all of our friends in the backyard and took turns hitting it with a bat. It was tough and took some time, but eventually, it burst open and candy rained from the

sky. We all scrambled to grab as much candy as we could, laughing and shouting with joy. It's one of the happiest moments of my childhood, and the memory still brings a smile to my face. The Hershey Kiss piñata had brought us all together, and we had a blast celebrating our victory over it. It was a simple but magical moment I always cherished. Oh, this is pretty close. I probably should have mentioned in the prompt that it was for a birthday party, right? I can add that in now, or I could go ba

ck and regenerate the story. But it was for my ninth birthday party. Okay, in large part, this is accurate. It did take us quite a while. Paper mache is not a short process, and we did have a hard time getting it open. That tin foil, even with a baseball bat, took a little while to kind of get through. And I love the fact that my mom took the time to do that with me. It is a cherished memory for me. So I would then put something like a title, but "Hershey Kiss Piñata." I would maybe say, "My mom

and I decided to make a Hershey Kiss piñata for my birthday party." And so, how are you making these changes? Are you just clicking in something? Yeah, so I just click here in the box wherever I want, like a word processor, and I'm able to add any changes that I want. And you can see as I'm doing this up here, it's auto-saving the changes, so I don't have to worry about losing my story or having something forgotten. Right, I can actually come over here and let's say I have a picture. I didn't h

ave one exactly, but I did find one that was fairly close to what we had put together. So I have here a giant Hershey Kiss. We had a little cardboard circle that we had used on the bottom and wrapped it up, so it looked very similar to this. So now I have a story. Here it was while I lived in Littleton, Colorado. Okay, add that information here. And it was on my birthday, August 1st, 1989, because I was nine years old. And so what I'll do at this point, I could if I had a second photo, I could g

o ahead and do that. There's a couple of different photo formats. But once I'm comfortable with it, I can proceed on and put a couple of people in this story. For my three, so you know, my mom, I can add myself. Those are the two people that are really mentioned here in this story. Okay, and then for me, this is a memory of something that my mom and I did together. Now, once you get to this point, I can choose who gets access to this story. Okay, so, and we should probably talk a little bit abou

t this because, prior to this, I created a group that just has my family members. I have a group that has my wife's family members. I can publish it to members on the story platform, but really, only people that follow me will get access to that story, even when it's public. Or I can keep it private. Maybe this is just more like a journal event, and I want to keep that private and explicitly share it with just a couple of people. Okay, so as a storyteller, I'm in control of who gets to see this

story and how that happens. So in this case, I would share it with my family. Probably, I'm fine. I have a couple of friends that are following me on Storyd, and so I'm fine leaving this as public. It will obscure any of the names or the birthdates of the living people, so we don't have to worry about that like other sites, right? And then I could come here and publish this story. And so once I've done that, this story will pop up in a couple of different places for me. Okay, so this is my perso

nal story area with all the different stories I've written. You can see there are 126 stories, but 25 are still in the draft state. Some of these I've used StoryAssist to create, and others I've just captured my own memories or memories from clips from books that I read about my ancestors. I also see it in my group feed, so this is the private area that my family has called Camp Feed. In here, I have 27 family members that will have this pop up in the group feed, so they'll be able to see that I

published a story about this when I was eight years old. Now, I could have included it in my in-laws. I think they care maybe a little less about my childhood memories and more about my children. So that's kind of my rule of thumb, although I could get specific, I guess. I did tell one story that they wanted to get access to. And also, in my home screen, I have a personal feed that will aggregate anyone that I'm following, plus group stories. And so here is the third place that I would come to

potentially see that story. And there's a variety of places that people can kind of get access to what's been written. Wow, that's such a great demo. I just want to get some clarifying things as we go along. So you said you access this from your home screen. So if we were just coming to storied for the very first time, how would we get to here? Yeah, so what would happen is you created an account, and maybe we can actually just go through that process if you want. So I'm going to join for free,

create a free account. We'll just put in an email address here. I guess we do ask a couple of questions to help customize the experience for people so that they can make sure they're getting what they want out of the site. Right, this is anonymous data, but it does help us make sure that the experience they have. I'm here to capture stories, memories, and photos and get my family to engage with that content. Okay, so this is the first-time homepage experience, right? Obviously, an offer to kind

of get started if you want to be researching historical content. But if not, you know, those stories that maybe I'm not interested in an offer right now. Right? I could start a tree or upload an existing Jed.com. Okay, we'll help kick off the hints engine and help start discovering content. It also allows me then to start sharing some stories. So that goes back to how you were able to link the one story you made to yourself and to your mother. Yeah, a little bit. Because I'd already created a tr

ee. So, in this experience, maybe I'm the home person, right? And it'll start to create my tree. Okay, now we are working on a wizard, essentially, that will come, well, walk people through the steps. Okay, we'll be released here pretty soon, but for right now, let's just add my mom. So, Mom's been added. So yeah, at this point, if I were to go tell any stories, yeah, that StoryAssist model, and then it would pre-pop my mom's name. Now, truth be told, I can actually tell a story about anyone. Ok

ay, so a different example, I guess, would be we can go into StoryAssist. It's a happy memory. This is my best friend, Brian. We lived together in Parker, Colorado. We loved jumping on the trampoline. We played baseball in the cul-de-sac back during the summers. We had epic all-nighters playing video games. And then one more interesting detail, I guess, he was from Brazil. Oh, okay, all right. So we'll go ahead and have this generate a story, a happy story or memory for me. Now, Brian isn't in m

y family tree, right? But I think there are a lot of stories that we would tell about ourselves and our ancestors that have meaningful people in our lives, and Brian was that for me. For four years, we lived next door to each other, and a lot of the interests and experiences that I have, I can attribute to the time that we spent together. And we've stayed in touch throughout the years. So even though he's not in my family tree, there's a way on storied for me to actually kind of graft him into m

y tree or tie him in, right? So, my best friend, Brian, is one of the most amazing people I've ever met. We lived in Parker, Colorado, and had some of the most amazing adventures, right? So it goes through and talks about some of the different things ordering pizza, drinking soda, staying up 'til the sun rose. That totally happened, right? It totally happened. But you didn't put that in there. I didn't. No, it kind of filled in some gaps for me. Right? We didn't eat a ton of Brazilian dishes tog

ether, so I would probably take that out. And so, this whole paragraph actually maybe doesn't make a lot of sense. And so maybe take that out. I have a picture of Brian. I have it readily available, but I could easily pull that in. Or maybe I'm not ready to do that, right? My best friend, Brian... Location? We've already said it's Parker, Colorado. Year, this would have been 1991-ish, so I can move forward. And then here, I'm in the story, right? So I want to tag the story to me. You can see my

list is a lot shorter because I don't have a ton of people. But now I can type Olive Mirra. I can add Brian here. Now, it's going to recognize, well, Brian's not in your tree and not in your account, so who should he be connected to? Well, he's connected to me, and our relationship is friend. So I can go next. I don't know. I don't remember Brian's birthday. I'm probably a bad friend. He is living, so I leave that unchecked so that it'll obscure that information for other people. But at this poi

nt, I've created a relationship or a connection between Brian and me. And so not only is he in the story, if I were to share the story with Brian and he were to join storied at some point in time, he would be able to connect that, and he would be able to add that story to his experience. And his kids or grandkids at some point in the future could potentially make that discovery because that connection exists. We're here on storied. I'm gonna go next. I'm gonna, for right now, make this story pri

vate, I guess. And you're gonna see that this now is in the account, but I can also come in here and go to my tree, go to myself. We'll hop into my profile, and there's this relationships tab where you can see I've created a new non-family relationship that is attached to me in this tree. And so you can see there's lots of different kinds of relationships that you could put and incorporate, and we even have this cool little visual. It's not maybe super helpful yet, but it's the beginnings of a w

ay to visualize a tree in a different way, where we can take the graph underlying, and you'll start to see family relationships will be green, my spouse and children will be red, and I have these other relationships that will show up in different colors and dots. I've showed you on the small tree, but I want to show you what that actually looks like for a tree that's been filled out. Right, so we'll come over here to my tree. A lot more people in this tree than in the demo tree, right? So I'll c

ome over here and I'll go to my profile, gonna hop on relationships, and you can see here I have co-workers and friends and different people that I've connected in, even some pets that are important to me. And so I can come in here to this relationship viewer, and you'll get a better sense for what this looks like. Now, there are more people in this tree, so the visualization is a little slow right now. You'll see this is an experimental feature that we're really trying to work on, and that will

increase in value over time. That's the nature of new technology, is that you start with a concept and then you expand it out. So that's all right. You're right, but it gets kind of fun here when it loads because you'll be able to see how all of these different people connect to one another. And essentially what we do is we'll look at yourself, and then we'll take kind of two hops. Yeah, it's moving. It's kind of settling in here. You know, it is kind of fun that way, but what you'll see here i

s I'm this center dot right here. And so you can see with the fuller tree what that looks like. These are different co-workers and friends. You'll see Dixie here is one of my dogs. We also have Drift. So they're brown because they're my pets. You'll see parents and siblings and then their kids as extended family. And so just a different way to think about a tree because with the different relationship types that you can put in, it doesn't naturally fit into a hierarchical structure. We do have t

hat family tree because everyone fits that model. But there are very different ways to think about ancestry and family history. And we feel like we're kind of on the cusp of, okay, we've done a lot within the family confines. How do we break out of that and handle things like adoption or other kinds of relationships that may exist that don't fit the natural blood relationship types? Yeah, that's really, really neat. All right, so I have some follow-up questions, and a couple of them are during o

ne of the demos that Storied put out, they talked about how easy it is to come up with stories. We all have tons of stories. Well, coming up with a story idea is a real struggle for me sometimes. But once I have an idea, I can get going. And it seems like what Storied is this tool that would help me even further. So how do you help people who are like me? They're like, "I don't know what story to start with. Do you have a tool? Do you have some suggestions?" Yeah, so there's a couple things that

we have that would help. So one of the things that we do with our social feeds is we actually put out story prompts. So if you follow Storied on Facebook or on Instagram or any of those platforms, we are pushing some of those story ideas out. Also, when you first create an account, if we go back to that test account, so if I go back to my home screen, I can see there's the opportunity to search. One of the things that we've done is you could choose to follow featured stories. And so if I click

on this featured story link, what it will do is it will actually provide some example stories for me that other people have written and have agreed to make featured on the site, right? And so here I could see, here's an example of maybe an older story. This is about an ancestor. Clearly, you can take a newspaper clipping. So I was like, "Oh, maybe I should go look and search for newspapers to see what I can find." Someone told a story about a birthday present. And so by going through this feed h

ere, you could actually get ideas that way. Okay, yeah, yeah. You would just go, "Where do I want to click? Okay, pull a story." Or come over here to "My stories." Okay, okay, perfect. Another thing that we're working on is a story starter. You can get a preview of that once I get past this. A couple of these models, never mind. I guess we took it out because I already told a story. Yeah, bummer. I was excited to show it to you. Okay, we have a widget that pops up for some people as well that ac

tually has real prompts that you can kind of transition through that will show you different story ideas. We're working on making it more persistent here on the site. Okay, well, that's a two-come-for feature, but it will be an opportunity to provide other ideas. I will say there's a couple things that I do that I find have been very helpful. Okay, a lot of times, if I find a picture on my Facebook feed or on my phone that provides enough of a memory for me that I'm like, "Oh, there's a story as

sociated with this," and so using an image, an heirloom, or an artifact as a story prompt can really get things going for me. The other thing that happens is I've been telling my kids stories as I've started to write some of these out, and they'll say, "Well, tell me about when you were eight years old." Well, even that can be enough of a prompt for me to think back, "Okay, when I was eight, what was I going through?" And just having that small thing can help. And then, once again, with StoryAss

ist, maybe I don't know exactly how I want to capture it all, but I can remember two or three details about that, and that's enough to get that StoryAssist engine going and get a rough draft started. Okay, so I have two more questions. The first one, I never put anything to a platform that I can't get out, so do you have any features where we can take the stories out and create some kind of project or send them to FamilySearch or something in that way? What do you have or what are you working on

? Yeah, so really good question. We're working on a couple things. I can't give tons of details, but we are working to partner with FamilySearch, and that's something that we hope to have out here pretty quick. The other thing that we're working on is a book printing option, so you'll be able to take these stories and actually compile them into a book and print those out. So both of those are kind of in the works right now, and excited to see where we can take that. Okay, so my number one vote i

s the printed book first and FamilySearch second. So if I had my brothers, that's what I would say, because books are become bedtime stories. My kids are still pulling books off the shelves that I made years ago, and they're like, "You're a little behind." I'm like, "Yeah, I started this YouTube channel, so I'm a little behind." Yeah, that's great. I mean, having that physical book that you can hold and flip through and read to your kids, I think it's a fantastic idea. So I'm glad to hear that's

your number one vote, and it's definitely something that we're working on. And FamilySearch as well, I think that's a great idea to integrate with them, so that you can take the stories and connect them with your genealogical research and have a more comprehensive family history. So those are definitely things that we're actively working on. Okay, so my last question is, "Where do we stay up to date on getting help or learning about new features? Tell us where to go from here." Yeah, so there's

a couple things. Obviously, create an account, and once you do that, we do have a newsletter that goes out once a month that will keep you up to date with new features that are releasing and what's going on. I mentioned our social platforms, and so we have major accounts on all of the social platforms that you can go and follow storied and see what's going on as well. We're trying to keep people informed through those mechanisms. That sounds great. Well, Brandon, I'm super excited, and I hope t

hat people will leave comments in the comments section of this video for you to kind of follow up with. But I really enjoyed this feature, the storied feature, among many available from storied. Storied offers tree building, core research, set research, and story writing at an affordable price. Check out the link in the description for how to access this new genealogy website. If you want to learn how to write longer family stories, be sure to check out this playlist on how to draft your family

history.