Ask your assistant to make the memorial

What this is

Writing about someone you have just lost is hard, and a blank page makes it harder. Some people find it easier to talk it through. If you use an assistant like Claude or ChatGPT, you can tell it about the person in your own words and ask it to create the memorial for you.

It works the same way as making one on this site. The memorial is yours, it appears in your account, and you can edit or delete it here at any time.

Not every assistant can do this

Assistants differ, and this is the part usually left out. Which one you have decides how much of it happens in your conversation, so it is worth knowing before you start.

Some can connect to us directly. These can be given permission to work with other services. If yours can, it will create the memorial, help you write the obituary and look after it afterwards, without you filling in anything. Ask it whether it can add a connector for cherishedbook.com.

Most can read the web but not connect. That is where the majority are today. It can still help with the hardest part, which is finding the words. Talk it through, then bring what you have written here and create the memorial yourself. That takes a few minutes.

If you are not sure which you have, ask it. An assistant that cannot connect will usually say so.

What you can ask it to do

This is the list for an assistant that can connect.

• Create a memorial for a person or a pet
• Write the obituary, or use words you have already written
• Change the wording later, or the design, or who can see it
• Add the photo you want at the top of the page
• Add where they are laid to rest, and directions for anyone visiting
• Read the tributes people have left, and publish or hide them
• Delete a memorial, which you can undo from your dashboard

What it cannot do

These limits are built in. They are not settings you have to remember to turn on.

• It cannot email anyone. No invitations, no messages to your family, nothing sent on your behalf.
• It cannot see anyone else's memorials. Only the ones you look after.
• It cannot publish anything that fails our safety check. Every memorial and every tribute is checked before it appears, and an assistant cannot skip that.
• It cannot change your account or sign in as you.
• It cannot rewrite what someone else wrote. Tributes stay in the words the person chose.

If your assistant can connect

Three steps, once.

1. Ask your assistant to connect to cherishedbook.com.
2. It gives you a link. Open it, and sign in if you are not already.
3. You will see exactly what it is asking for. Choose Approve, or Not now.

That is the only time you need to do anything. Afterwards you can just ask, and the memorial appears in your account here.

Technical setup for the assistant: the address is https://app.cherishedbook.com/api/mcp. Anyone building their own tools should read the developer reference, and an assistant reading this page will find what it needs in the agent reference.

If it cannot connect

This is the common case, and it does not stop you. Ask it to help you write about the person, in your own words and at whatever pace suits you. When you have something you are happy with, bring it here and create the memorial yourself. You can paste in what you wrote.

Some assistants will give you a link instead of asking you to copy anything. Opening it brings you here with the name, the dates and anything you wrote already in the boxes, so you check it rather than type it again. You still finish the memorial yourself, which means you see every word before anyone else does.

You lose nothing by doing it this way. The memorial is the same, the safety checks are the same, and the writing help on this site is free whether an assistant was involved or not.

You stay in control

An assistant can only do what you have allowed, and you can take that back whenever you like. Sign in and open Connected apps in your account to see everything you have connected, when it was last used, and disconnect anything you no longer want. Nothing you have created is affected by disconnecting.

The first time an assistant uses the access you gave it, we email you to say so. If it was not you, that email has a link to shut it off.

What your assistant can see

Worth being straight about this. Our own AI runs on our servers and nothing you write is sent anywhere else. That is true for the safety checks and for the help with writing the obituary, and connecting an assistant does not change it.

What changes is that your assistant reads your memorial, using the permission you gave it. We do not send it to anyone. Your assistant collects it. Where that reading happens depends on which assistant you use, so if it is one that runs on another company's servers, your memorial is read there. If you ask it to help with tributes, that includes what other people wrote and the email address they left.

None of that happens unless you connect an assistant, and disconnecting stops it. Our AI statement explains where each part runs.

The rules, briefly

A connected app acts as you, so anything it creates is yours in the same way as anything you write yourself. Please read what an assistant has written before you share a memorial with your family.

Access is for looking after your own memorials. There are limits on how many you can create and how quickly, to keep it that way. If someone uses it to make memorials in bulk, or for people they have no connection to, we withdraw access and take that content down. The full wording is in our terms.

If you would rather not

You never have to use this. Creating a memorial on the site takes a few minutes, and the result is exactly the same.

Create a memorial here instead