What is Voices of History?

Jonah Aden and Josh Hegstad founded Voices of History in 2026. Jonah is the CEO and Josh is the CTO, and both study computer science at Columbia. It started on a study break in Butler Library during finals week, with the old question of who you would have dinner with if you could pick anyone from history. Josh said Nikola Tesla, Jonah said Leonardo da Vinci.

The first version was called School of Athens, after the Raphael painting that puts great minds from different eras in one room. It was rinky dink, a GPT wrapper with blocky three.js characters, and people at a couple of Columbia entrepreneurship events kept telling us to turn it into a company. We incorporated Voices of History on May 5, 2026.

We make two products, and each one lives on its own site.

• DebateHero

  A history debate game. Pick a figure, set a topic, and argue it out while a live judge scores the round and flags fallacies as they land. A new Daily matchup every day needs no account.

  Play at debatehero.com ↗

• Awaken History

  Our education product. A student reads a short primer, then sits down with the figure behind it, by voice or by typing, and has to defend what they think. Every conversation ends with a prep card the class picks up from. In pilot with courses at Columbia.

  Visit awakenhistory.com ↗

We're also building exhibits for museums and historic sites, so a visitor can ask the person behind the glass their own question, and a studio for creators who want historical figures in their videos and podcasts. Both are in development.

Anyone with a twenty dollar subscription can tell a chatbot to act like Abraham Lincoln. We don't do that. For every figure we build a large corpus out of their quotes, speeches, letters, and writings, and every answer draws on it. Responses come back sourced and hyperlinked, so you can follow a claim back to the text it came from.

The other half is restraint. Ask a figure about something outside their record and it tells you where the record runs out, instead of bluffing to fill the silence. We think that admission is the most trustworthy part of a conversation. The longer version is on our accuracy standard page.

The figures are people who left behind enough of a record to build from: Socrates, Plato, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Frederick Douglass, Nikola Tesla, Theodore Roosevelt, Alan Turing, and more. Their own words are the raw material, so a figure is only as good as what survives of the person, and we would rather leave someone out than make them up.

Each figure is an AI model, not the person. The positions trace back to what they wrote, but the sentences are new and any voice you hear is synthetic, so nothing a figure says should be quoted as the real person's words.

Students and teachers first, because a classroom is where an accurate conversation matters most. A teacher can assign a figure the same way they assign a reading, and the conversation brings the student back to that reading instead of around it.

Then anyone who likes history and a good argument, museums that want visitors asking their own questions, and creators making history content. We build for the fourth grader and the professor alike, if you can hold a conversation you can learn from these people.

We are not a general chatbot, a citation database, or a facts API. We're also not the Voices of History channel and podcast where Larry Cappetto shares interviews with military veterans. That is a separate project with real veterans telling their own stories, and we have no connection to it.

If you are writing about us, the press page has the boilerplate, founder bios, and logos, and the founders read every email at founders@voicesofhistory.co.