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StoryCorps Goes Global with New App Unveiled at TED

Founder Dave Isay gets his TED Prize Wish to create an enduring digital archive of human stories.
TED Prize Winner Dave Isay speaks at TED2015 - Truth and Dare, Session 5, March 16-20, 2015, Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, Canada. Photo: James Duncan Davidson/TED. Image via

Since the dawn of StoryCorps, a national effort to unearth everyday stories through facilitated face-to-face interviews, founder Dave Isay and his team have culled over 100,000 dialogues, making it the largest collection of human voices ever. Now with the help of a newly launched app, anyone, anywhere in the world can record an interview on their mobile device and make it audible on the StoryCorps.me site. Additionally, every story shared during the first year of launch will be archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

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The app, which is still in beta, is part of the $1 million dollar TED Prize Wish Isay announced at the TED Conference last night. "Here is my wish,” he told audiences, “that you will help us to take everything we’ve learned through StoryCorps and bring it to the world so that anyone, anywhere, can easily record a meaningful interview with another human being, which then will be archived for history.”

Ultimately, Isay hopes this digital archive of conversations can be enduring in the way so many of our daily communications are not. “StoryCorps is the opposite of reality TV. Nobody comes to get rich. Nobody comes to get famous. It’s just an act of giving to another human being,” he told us last November, shortly after he was announced the new TED Prize recipient. Below, take a peek inside the app and head over to iTunes or Google Play to download and try it out for yourself:

Images courtesy TED

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