Talk to the Past
An AI from before 1931
Free · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Mr. Whitmore is at his desk. He has read every book printed before 1931 and nothing since. Send a wireless dispatch and find out what the world sounded like.
Talk to the Past is an AI correspondent who genuinely lives in 1930. He has not heard of the moon landing. He has not heard of the internet. He has, however, heard quite a lot about the cinema, the wireless, and the markets that crashed only last October.
This is not a modern chatbot in costume. The character — Mr. W. Whitmore, a gentleman of London — speaks through talkie-1930-13b-it, an open-source 13-billion-parameter language model trained from the very first token of its corpus on English text written before 1931. No fine-tune. No "stay in character" system prompt. The vocabulary, the cadence, the opinions, the ignorance — all of it is what could have been read by candlelight or under a gaslamp before the year 1931 dawned.
Built on a model released earlier this year by:
— Alec Radford, researcher and architect of foundational language models
— David Duvenaud, University of Toronto CS professor and former Alignment Evals lead at Anthropic
— Nick Levine, an independent researcher and former financial historian at Winton
INSIDE THE APP
• A single deeply-realised correspondent — not a menu of four hundred shallow personas
• Telegram-style dispatches you address to him; replies in italic letter form, streamed token-by-token as the wireless allows
• Multi-conversation history kept entirely on your device — no accounts, no cloud, no analytics SDKs
• A light, art-deco interface — cream paper, ink-blue type, IM Fell English
NO ADS. NOT NOW. NOT EVER.
We will not show advertising in the middle of a letter. We will not sell your conversations. The only thing keeping the wireless office open is the subscription.
FREE
Ten dispatches per day. The office reopens at midnight. No accounts, no signup. Just open the app and write.
PRO — $2.99 a month
Unlimited dispatches. Cancel anytime in your Apple ID settings. Pricing displayed in your App Store's local currency at the moment of purchase. The subscription covers the running cost of the model and keeps the line open for everyone else.
A NOTE ON MR. WHITMORE
He can be wrong. He invents on occasion. He sometimes mistakes the year of your question and recovers with a small embarrassment. Treat him as you would any letter from a stranger from the past — for what he knew of his world, not as a reference text.
He is a 1930 mind reaching across nearly a century of telegraph wire, and the joins occasionally show. We think the magic is in those joins. We hope you'll find it too.
—
Talk to the Past is an independent project. The talkie-1930-13b-it model is released under Apache 2.0 by its authors; this app is not affiliated with them.
Ratings & Reviews
- Fixed subscriptions
- Server connection improvements
The developer, Alexander Knigge, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Alexander Knigge
- Size
- 3.6 MB
- Category
- Education
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 17.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 17.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Alexander Knigge