A national survey asked Americans a simple question: did you ever record a conversation with someone you loved before they were gone. The answers split into two groups, and the gap between them is not the one you would expect.
A National Survey Asked 6,090 Americans if They Had Recorded a Loved One's Voice. The Ones Who Had Were the Most Likely to Wish They Had Recorded More.
YouGov's Daily Agenda survey polled 6,090 U.S. adults on May 31 and June 1, 2022. Only 33 percent had ever recorded or documented a conversation with someone close to them. But 47 percent said they regret not recording a conversation with someone who has since died, and that regret ran highest, 77 percent, among the very people who had already recorded one.
Ask most people if they wish they had recorded a parent's voice, or a grandmother's stories, and they will say yes without thinking twice. **The harder question is whether they ever actually did it, and a 2022 YouGov survey of 6,090 U.S. adults went looking for the honest answer.**
Only one in three Americans, 33 percent, said they had ever recorded or documented a conversation with someone close to them, to preserve the memory of it. Fifty nine percent had not. **And nearly half of all Americans, 47 percent, said they specifically regret not recording a conversation with someone who has since died.**
That much lines up with what you would expect: most people do not do the thing, and most people wish they had. **The strange part of the data is what happened inside the group that already had.**
1. The people who did it regretted it the most
If recording a conversation settled the matter, the people who had already done it should show the least regret in the whole survey. **They showed the most.** Among Americans who said they had documented a conversation with a loved one, 77 percent still said they regretted not recording one before someone close to them died.
That is not a contradiction once you sit with it. **Recording one conversation does not teach you that you have enough. It teaches you what you were missing the other three hundred times you didn't.** The people with a saved voicemail, an old video, one recorded afternoon, are the ones who know exactly what all the unrecorded afternoons were worth.
Doing it once does not close the regret. It is usually the moment someone realizes how much they still do not have.
2. Younger people are already catching on
The survey found a real generational split: **American adults under 45 are nearly twice as likely to have documented a conversation with a loved one as Americans 45 and older.** Younger adults have grown up with a phone that records without a second thought, and it is changing what they think to save.
But being younger does not fix the shape of the problem, **it just moves it forward. A 30 year old who never called to ask a grandparent a real question is on the same path as the 45-and-older group is on today, just a few decades behind them.**
The tools got easier. The habit of actually picking up the phone and asking did not fix itself.
3. The fix is not a better recorder
Most people already own something that can record a phone call. **What is missing is not the equipment. It is a reason to sit down, a question worth asking, and someone who will actually make the call.**
That is the whole idea behind LifeScribe. **Ari calls, asks a real question, one at a time, and keeps what comes back**, so the 33 percent who have preserved a conversation stops being the ceiling, and the 77 percent who wished they had done more of it finally gets a way to.
You do not need better technology to stop regretting this. You need one phone call to actually happen.
I always meant to sit my mom down and record her talking about her childhood. I kept meaning to. Ari just called her instead, and now I have forty minutes of her voice I would not have otherwise. I did not know how much I needed that until I had it.Denise, 51, recording her mother's stories on Ari
What you get with LifeScribe
- A 2022 YouGov survey of 6,090 U.S. adults found 47 percent regret not recording a conversation with someone close to them who has since died.
- Only 33 percent had ever recorded such a conversation, and among that group, 77 percent still regretted not recording more.
- Adults under 45 are nearly twice as likely as adults 45 and older to have already documented a conversation with a loved one.
- Ari calls and asks a real question, so preserving a voice does not depend on someone finally getting around to it.
Start free, with nothing to lose
Try it on your next call with a parent or grandparent, free. Nothing to install, nothing to schedule around. If you already have one recording tucked away somewhere, you already know what this is worth.
**The 77 percent is the number that should worry you, not the 47.** It is not the people who never tried who regret this the most. It is the people who tried once and learned exactly what they had been missing. The only way to not end up in that group is to keep the conversation going while you still can.
Do not wait until one recording teaches you how much you are missing.
Ari calls and asks a real question, so the voice you would give anything to have back gets saved now, while the call is still possible to make.
Questions grandparents ask us
What did the survey actually find?
YouGov's Daily Agenda survey polled 6,090 U.S. adults on May 31 and June 1, 2022. It found that 47 percent regret not recording a conversation with someone close to them who has since died, while only 33 percent had ever recorded or documented such a conversation.
Why did people who had already recorded a conversation report more regret, not less?
Among people who said they had documented a conversation with a loved one, 77 percent still said they regretted not recording one before someone close to them died. Having one recording appears to make people more aware of everything they did not preserve, not less.
Is this only about older generations?
No. The survey found adults under 45 are nearly twice as likely to have documented a conversation with a loved one as adults 45 and older, but being younger does not remove the regret, it just delays it to a later point in life.
How does LifeScribe help with this?
Ari calls and asks real questions, one at a time, and keeps what is said. It turns preserving a loved one's voice from something you mean to get around to into something that just happens, one phone call at a time.
https://getlifescribeapp.com/blog/wished-they-had-recorded-more