Heirloom AI — Grandpa's Voice-to-Recipe & Family Memoir Archiver

Waheedur Rahman — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 09:10:22 +0000

## What I Built

Heirloom AI — A Sovereign Family Recipe & Memoir Archiver Built for a Friend

I built Heirloom AI for my 82-year-old grandfather, Nonno Matteo, and my roommate, Leo, who suffers from severe Celiac disease and tree nut allergies.

The problem wasn't that our family didn't have recipes.

The problem was that our recipes weren't in books or apps—they were stored entirely inside an elderly man's memories.

Nonno doesn't type on keyboards or navigate smartphone apps. When asked how to make his legendary Sunday braised short rib sugo or holiday olive oil polenta cake, he records 10-minute stream-of-consciousness audio memos.

So I built Heirloom AI—a local, open-source AI assistant that turns rambling family voice memos into a searchable, structured heirloom cookbook ledger while actively auditing recipes for roommate dietary safety.

Demo

🚀 Live Demo: https://waheedkhan70.github.io/Heirloom/

💻 GitHub Repository: https://github.com/waheedkhan70/Heirloom

You can record Grandpa speaking naturally or drop in raw audio and transform the recording into structured recipes, preserved family lore, and dietary-safe substitutions.

How I Built It

Heirloom AI is built around open-source AI, local client-side processing, and private inference.

The architecture looks like this:

                ┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
                │          Grandpa's Voice             │
                │   Live Mic / Audio Memo / Transcript │
                └──────────────────┬───────────────────┘
                                   │
                                   ▼
                ┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
                │        Open-Source AI Layer          │
                │                                      │
                │  Local Ollama (Gemma 2 / Llama 3.2)  │
                │   + Web Audio API & In-Browser NLP   │
                └──────────────────┬───────────────────┘
                                   │
                                   ▼
                ┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
                │     Dual-Disentanglement Engine      │
                │                                      │
                │   Emotional Lore  │  Culinary Blueprint│
                │   • 1954 Calabria │  • Metric Scaling │
                │   • Secret Rules  │  • Phase Timelines│
                └──────────┬───────────────────┬───────┘
                           │                   │
                           ▼                   ▼
                ┌──────────────────┐   ┌───────────────┐
                │ Heirloom Memoir  │   │   SafeBite    │
                │ Keepsake Lore &  │   │ Roommate Celiac│
                │ Wine Pairing     │   │ & Allergy Guard│
                └──────────┬───────┘   └───────┬───────┘
                           │                   │
                           └─────────┬─────────┘
                                     │
                                     ▼
                ┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
                │        Family Kitchen Ledger         │
                │                                      │
                │    Printable Card • Dynamic Servings │
                │    Offline LocalStorage Vault • .md  │
                └──────────────────────────────────────┘

Technology Stack

Frontend & Client Architecture

Semantic HTML5
Vanilla Modern CSS
Web Audio API
MediaRecorder
HTML5 Web Speech Recognition
Client-side processing

Open AI & Inference Layer

Ollama
Gemma 2
Llama 3.2
Mistral
Phi-3
Custom Dual-Disentanglement prompt harness

Dietary Safety & Math Engine

Dynamic portion scaling
Imperial ↔ Metric conversion
Real-time allergen tagging
Culinary substitution mapping

Persistence & Archival

Browser LocalStorage
JSON export/import
Markdown export

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

For a tool built around elderly loved ones and family heritage, privacy is not an optional feature—it is the entire foundation.

With open-weight models running locally through Ollama or client-side processing, the system can keep sensitive family information on the user's own machine instead of requiring a cloud AI service.

Open innovation also gives me control over:

which model runs locally
prompts and model behavior
the retrieval and processing pipeline
model versions and quantization
offline operation
long-term archival
recurring API costs

For a project designed to preserve someone's personal memories, having control over the technology and where the data is processed is especially important.

My Agent Session

Development was tracked and orchestrated using an agentic pair-programming workflow, including:

Rapid architectural prototyping
Audio visualization integration
Dynamic culinary calculation logic
Allergen substitution mapping
Print-ready recipe card generation

Prize Categories

Best Use of Gemma / Open-Weight Models

Heirloom AI relies on open-weight LLMs such as Gemma 2 and Llama 3.2 as core reasoning engines rather than using an AI model only as a cosmetic chatbot layer.

The models are used for:

Parsing unstructured spoken language
Extracting culinary steps and measurements
Identifying temporal cooking phases
Separating historical stories from recipe instructions
Preserving memorable family narratives
Supporting dietary-safety processing

Built for One Person

The most important part of this project isn't the code.

It's the people I built it for.

I didn't start with:

"What AI hype project should I build?"

I started with:

"How do I save my 82-year-old grandfather's life recipes before they are lost forever, while keeping my roommate Leo safe at our dinner table?"

What was missing was a private, respectful bridge that turns spoken love and culinary wisdom into a lasting family heirloom.

That's what I built with Heirloom AI.

Try It

🚀 Demo: https://waheedkhan70.github.io/Heirloom/

💻 Source Code: https://github.com/waheedkhan70/Heirloom

Intro

Waheedur Rahman — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 11:26:15 +0000

I am new to the community, happy to be the part of dev...

DEV Community: Waheedur Rahman