CocoBuddy: Family Conversation

Conversations with your kids you can listen back to. Pick a question, record the conversation together, and relive the moment as they grow up.

Comment

Inspiration

Alice and I build apps to bring families closer together and make the time they spend with each other more meaningful. CocoBuddy is our latest app and the one we're entering for the Peace Prize and the Design Award.

The idea came from Alice going back to old voice memos of random conversations she had with our kids, Ruby and Rylo. Listening back, she'd hear their contagious laughs, their funny thoughts, mispronounced words, and the smallness in their voices. She realized photos and videos are nice to look back on, but hearing their tiny voices took her right back to that moment. We wanted more of those moments and a way to save and organize them, so we built CocoBuddy together with the kids.

Our goal with CocoBuddy is to inspire conversations between parents and their kids that normally wouldn't happen, and we believe that bonding is the core value. We designed it to be the opposite of an app that maximizes screen time. We wanted it to be cozy and simple enough for the whole family to use, with the intent of it staying in the background so the focus can be on the conversation.

What it does

CocoBuddy is a conversation journal for families. Once you open the app, there is a deck of question cards to swipe through, like "What made you laugh today?" Pick one, tap record, and see where the conversation goes. It's then saved to that family member's profile with a transcript, so you can search by what was said and listen back to it.

Features include:

  • Questions for any moment. Over a hundred built in, from silly ("If your stuffed animals could talk, what would they say?") to thoughtful ("What are you most proud of?"), or write your own.
  • Questions for special occasions. Birthday, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and holiday sets appear on Home when the day is near. Ask the same question each year and listen back to the earlier answers.
  • Kids ask parents, too. Grown-ups get their own questions, like "Tell me about a time you got in trouble as a kid."

How we built it

A native iPhone app for iOS 26+, written in Swift and SwiftUI. Recording uses AVFoundation, and transcription runs entirely on the device with Apple's speech frameworks, so audio is never sent anywhere to be transcribed. Memories live on the phone first; Firebase backs them up only if a family signs in with Apple. CocoBuddy Premium runs on the RevenueCat SDK, with an annual subscription and a lifetime purchase. Version 0.1 went live on the App Store on September 21, 2026.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out how to charge for it. We weren't sure how much to charge, how many free memories to give, and whether to run a free trial, offer a monthly subscription, or charge separately for Family Sharing. The one thing we were sure about is that no one loses access to their kid's recordings if their subscription lapses because families should be able to keep their memories as long as they want.

We settled on a freemium model with no free trial: every family can save five memories for free, with everything else unlocked. CocoBuddy Premium unlocks unlimited memories for $19.99 a year or a $99.99 one-time lifetime purchase (USD). We haven't offered a lifetime option in our other apps, but it felt right for this kind of product so a family can keep capturing new memories over many years without having to manage another subscription. Both options include Family Sharing, so one purchase covers every member of the family. No monthly plan and no ads. We decided to start with a low annual price since the feature set is still small, and it's also a way to thank our early supporters.

Designing for long-term retention without streaks, pressure, or addictive tactics. It's been a challenge to think about how to bring our users back into the app without employing common gamification techniques. I (Michael) spent over a decade in mobile gaming, and it was critical for us to not use common tactics like streaks, pressure, and FOMO, yet still get people excited about continuing to use the app for many years to come. We took inspiration from Nintendo, where we build around real moments (the occasion question sets) and keep adding Easter eggs and moments of delight as families continue to use the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of what we've built as a family. Alice and I have been building apps together for over a decade, but this one is extra special because it's the first time we got our kids involved. From naming the app (after Coco, Ruby's koala lovey), to contributing their own questions with me by prompting Claude, to testing and finding bugs, they really got to see firsthand how to make their ideas come to life.

I've already saved so many memorable conversations with my kids thanks to CocoBuddy, but my favorite one to listen back to is the question set from Father's Day earlier this year. It's something I'll cherish forever, and I look forward to hearing how their answers change as they get older.

I've also really appreciated how different the experience is when the roles get flipped and the kids ask the parents the questions. It changes the dynamic and creates opportunities for vulnerable questions that don't normally come up otherwise. My kids love hearing about the times grandma was mad at me when I was a child, or when I was scared of something and how I got past it.

What we learned

AI workflows have been a huge unlock for us as a small team, but we find that they still fall short for art and animations, at least for the style and feel that we're striving for. We tried early on to scale an art pipeline for various characters, animations, and environment assets, but it didn't meet our quality bar. Alice currently draws the assets by hand, and even though it's slower, we're actually happy with the workflow since it keeps our style distinct.

What's next for CocoBuddy

For upcoming minor releases, we're working on improvements to the core experience:

  • Editing transcriptions
  • Conversation lookbacks, to see how answers have changed over time
  • Better sharing (raw audio can be exported today, but we want to make it easy to share audio and transcripts together)

For our major 1.0 release: lots of fun surprises and moments of joy for the family. One example: after recording a conversation for Halloween, unlock a Halloween costume for your buddy and a spooky theme for the environment and question cards. We plan to add fun interactive rewards for every seasonal event, and much more beyond that.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates

Submission history