Lakewood Ranch businessman uses AI to capture lasting memories

If you ask Lakewood Ranch's Mike O'Donnell, the greatest story every told is — your own.

He and longtime business partner Anthony Phills came to that conclusion years ago, following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when the Pass Christian, Mississippi home of O'Donnell's parents, Audrey and Larry O'Donnell, was wiped out, causing the loss of family movies, photo albums, records and personal memorabilia.

Seventy-nine years of his family's heritage was wiped away in a moment. Since O'Donnell had three kids of his own, he had been excited about passing that heritage along to them. Audrey O'Donnell died in 2012 and Larry O'Donnell died in December.

Mike O'Donnell was able to piece back together about 70% of the lost memories, but he started to wonder how all the history could have been preserved digitally and crafted into a story. As he says, stories often die with the storyteller.

He had worked with Phills for years in the technology industry in Seattle, Washington, so they began to brainstorm about ways a company could collect all that personal information and not only document it, but craft it into a personal life story.

They formed the Leaves Legacy Project, but unfortunately, $250,000 into the experiment, they were faced with the same sticking point. They couldn't get around the enormous cost of getting a writer to spend the time sifting through interviews, images and information, and then to write the story.

"We could digitalize all the stuff, the family archives, but how would you attach stories to the artifacts? That was the big missing piece," he said.

O'Donnell, a University of Florida graduate who grew up in Cocoa Beach, eventually came across an artificial intelligence engine that brought everything together. That led to the "Times of My Life" virtual biographer, which is now active and available to the public at Leaves.us.

"I was so discouraged after our 2011-2013 run," said O'Donnell, who is the co-founder and CEO of Leaves Legacy Project. "AI moved it forward."

"The first thing our technology does is to capture details, to ask questions, to amass data," he said. "AI can do it efficiently and quickly. It could be my wedding, the birth of my child, my defining moments, my bout with cancer. We created a virtual biographer.

"Your story is not one book. It is hundreds of little stories, the defining moments in life. There are many great, little stories."

The "Times of My Life" virtual biographer collects information, and combines that information with artifacts, photos, records, to create those life stories.

"People keep movies, photos, birth certificates, and there are stories behind all of that," O'Donnell said. "Unfortunately, those are often stored in boxes in the attic and the story never is written."

The "Times of My Life" AI-powered engine helps people tell, share and preserve their life stories in a book format. The AI program is populated with 30,000 life topics.

"You are the story teller," O'Donnell said. "You take the details and put them into your story. You capture what happened, and the emotions, and what everyone was thinking."

O'Donnell, who said he is a documentary junkie, said most people don't even attempt writing their own life story because they simply are not good writers.

"And they can't afford a ghost writer," he said. "Some (writers) will charge $10,000 to write a life story."

The next part of the project was to find a consumable format.

"Times of My Life" is surprisingly inexpensive. The first story is free, and after that it is a dollar to receive the story. It is $3,99 for podcast form and $4.99 in video form. 

After the input of images and stories, O'Donnell's technology takes 15 seconds to produce a 3,000-word story.

Clients can add to an overall life story chapter by chapter, or they can have stories about many different experiences and topics and keep them on their own. Or they could create their own form of greeting cards to send to their family about important life events.

O'Donnell sees many of his future customers belonging to affinity groups, such as churches, schools, military units, and communities nonprofits.

His virtual biographer can help jog a client's memory by asking questions about an important event, such as a prom, a graduation, or a wedding, and by playing music in the background that actually was played at the event. Memories click in and it helps the person relive the memories.

O'Donnell said people will want to write about more than just big events in their lives. "People want to write about why they got their tattoo," he said. "That might be a big event to them."

A mentor and teacher at the University of Miami and Broward College, O'Donnell said the story telling process will consist of four main parts — capture details through interviews and flashbacks; writing the story based on words from the interview; quick insertion of photos and/or videos and other images; and producing the product into consumable media.

The Leaves Legacy Project also can pick a narrator's voice for each person's story. He said imagine having Morgan's Freeman voice narrate your story or a Taylor Swift song playing in the background.