How Next of Kin works, what it does, and what it doesn't.
Last reviewed: April 2026 | Maintained by: Next of Kin
Next of Kin is a knowledge tool, not a medical system. This page explains how it works in plain language — what happens to the information you share, how the AI uses it, and where the limits are.
When a caregiver uses Next of Kin, they build a knowledge base about the person they care for. That knowledge base is made up of everything they choose to share: journals, voice recordings, documents, photos, interview transcripts, notes.
When a carer asks a question — “What should I do if Ben seems upset?” — Next of Kin searches that knowledge base and returns an answer. The answer is drawn from what the family actually shared, not from general care guidance or clinical databases.
That's the core of it. Everything else is in service of that moment.
Everything you upload is stored in a secure database provided by Supabase, a GDPR-compliant infrastructure provider. All data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
Your profile and its contents are only accessible to:
We do not have standing access to your profile. We do not browse or read what you have shared.
Next of Kin uses a technique called Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or RAG. Here is what that means in practice:
Step 1 — Ingestion. When you upload a document, record a voice note, or complete an interview, the content is processed and broken into chunks. Each chunk is converted into a mathematical representation called an embedding — a way of capturing the meaning of the text so it can be searched by meaning rather than just by keyword.
Step 2 — Storage. Those embeddings are stored alongside the original text in a vector database. The original text is never modified or summarised at this stage.
Step 3 — Retrieval. When a carer asks a question, we convert that question into an embedding and search for the chunks in the knowledge base that are most relevant to it. We retrieve the closest matches.
Step 4 — Generation. The retrieved chunks — the actual words from the family's journals, interviews, and notes — are passed to a large language model along with the carer's question. The model generates an answer using those specific passages as its source material.
Step 5 — Citation. The answer includes a reference to where the information came from. A carer can see that an answer came from Evelyn's journal entry from March 2024, for example — not from a generic care database or from the AI's general training.
The AI can only answer from what has been shared. If a family hasn't mentioned something, the AI doesn't know it. It will not invent information, guess, or fill gaps with general care advice.
If a question cannot be answered from the knowledge base, the AI says so. An honest “I don't have anything from Evelyn about that” is more useful than a confident guess.
The AI does not:
Next of Kin uses AI services provided by Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (Whisper for transcription). When content is processed — a document embedded, a voice note transcribed — it passes through these providers' systems.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI have data processing agreements that govern how they handle content sent to their APIs. We are in the process of formalising Business Associate Agreements with both providers.
We do not use your content to train AI models. We do not permit our AI providers to use your content for model training.
When you record a voice note or complete a voice interview, the audio is sent to OpenAI's Whisper service for transcription. The resulting text is stored in your knowledge base. The original audio file is also stored.
Whisper is a speech-to-text model. It does not analyse the content of what you say — it converts speech to text. The content analysis happens at the retrieval and generation stage described above.
To be clear about our limits:
Answers from Next of Kin are suggestions, not instructions. They are informed by what a family has shared and should be treated the way you would treat advice from a knowledgeable colleague — useful context, not a directive.
A carer who receives an answer about how to help someone in distress should use their own professional judgment alongside that answer. Next of Kin supports carers; it does not replace them.
AI tools can sometimes generate confident-sounding answers that aren't true. This is called hallucination, and it is a known limitation of general-purpose AI. Next of Kin is built to prevent it.
Every answer the system gives is grounded in what your family has actually shared — nothing more. When a carer asks a question, the system searches only the knowledge base your family has built: the journals, voice recordings, interviews, and documents you have contributed. It does not draw on outside sources, make assumptions, or fill gaps with plausible-sounding invention.
Responses are cited back to their source, so a carer can always see exactly where the information came from — a specific journal entry, a voice note, an interview answer — and judge it for themselves. If something hasn't been recorded, the system says so rather than guessing.
The knowledge base is your family's voice. Not the AI's imagination.
This page is reviewed whenever we make a material change to how the technology works — a new AI provider, a change to how data is stored, a new processing step. The review date at the top of the page reflects the last time it was checked for accuracy.
If you have a question about something not covered here, write to us at hello@nextofkin.ai.