I built WhosZoo because I wanted a way to remember almost anything about the people, places, and things in my life.
I didn't want another system that required a lot of organization or digging around to find something. I wanted it to be mobile first, available in just a few clicks, and fast. When I ask a question, I don't want to wait while something searches through hundreds of notes. WhosZoo loads my memory into the AI's context so the information is immediately available to talk to.
By default, WhosZoo uses Claude Haiku through your own Anthropic API key. I've found Haiku to be more than capable for this type of memory retrieval while also being relatively inexpensive to use.
Privacy was also extremely important to me. I knew I would eventually put things into WhosZoo that I wouldn't necessarily want someone else reading, so I put a lot of effort into making the application as secure as I reasonably could.
One of my favorite parts of the design is that my memories aren't trapped in WhosZoo. I can export my entire memory corpus into a single file. That gives me a simple backup, but more importantly, it means I can take my memories somewhere else someday. If a better application comes along in the future, my data can go with me.
What surprised me most is how often I actually use it. I originally built WhosZoo because I thought it would be useful occasionally. Instead, I find myself talking to my memory almost every day.
Recently, my family experienced a house fire. Four of our vehicles were completely destroyed. At about 1:00 in the morning, the fire chief asked me for a vehicle's license plate number and other details. The vehicle was sitting burned in front of me, but within seconds I had the information because I had stored it in WhosZoo.
That's probably the best example I've had of why I built this.
There are much simpler examples too. I've gone to family gatherings and used WhosZoo to remind myself of nieces' and nephews' names or details about people I haven't seen for a while. Instead of thinking, "I know I should remember this," I can quickly look it up and then get back to the person standing in front of me.
WhosZoo started as something I built for myself. I'm open sourcing it because I've found it far more useful than I expected, and I think other people may find their own reasons to use it too.