Tukios updated Heardstone this week. After an arrangement conversation, a director can now generate an AI obituary draft from the details gathered in that meeting, select photos, choose a header image, and edit the whole tribute from a phone. The notes sync to the Tukios dashboard automatically. It is on iOS and Android today.
I like this. A director sitting at a desk at ten o’clock at night, staring at a blank obituary template after a long day of serving families, is a director who is not home with their own people. Anything that gives that hour back is worth using, and I tell the owners and agents I work with to use it.
Here is what I also tell them.
Every funeral home with a Tukios login now has access to the same draft engine. It reads the same kind of intake notes. It writes in the same default voice, the pleasant, careful, slightly generic voice every AI tool produces when nobody has taught it anything better. If ten homes in ten different markets run it the way the app suggests, they will produce ten obituaries that read as if one person wrote them all. Families will not be able to name what feels off. They will just sense that the words could have belonged to anyone; and they just won’t mean as much.
You compete on being the funeral home that is not just any other funeral home. Your community knows how you talk. They know the director who always says a certain thing at the door, the way your staff handles the first phone call, the way you sit with a family who has no idea where to start. That sound is a real business asset, and it took years to earn. A default AI setting will flatten it in a single afternoon if you let it.
The same holds for everything else AI touches in your firm. The follow-up note after a service. The email to a family six months out. The social post on a holiday weekend. The planning guide on your website. Each one is either written in your voice or written in the voice everyone else is renting. Run all of it on factory settings and the whole firm starts to sound like the app rather than like YOU.
The fix has two parts, and neither one is a software purchase.
The first is your voice. Before you ask any tool to write for you, you need a clear, written description of how you actually sound. The words you use and the ones you refuse to use. How long your sentences tend to run. How warm you get and where you stop. What you say to a family in the first five minutes and what you leave unsaid. Most owners have never written this down. They carry it in their heads and in thirty years of habit, and a tool cannot read either one. So it has to go on paper, in a form an AI can actually follow.
The second is your content vault. This is the collection of real material that belongs only to you: the stories you tell at seminars, the phrases that get a family nodding, the local history your firm is part of, the answers you give to the same questions every month, the letters families wrote back to you. Feed a tool that material and it drafts from your world. Feed it nothing and it drafts from the average of the internet. The vault is what turns a generic assistant into something that sounds like it has worked in your building. Yes, it’s a lot of work and yes, it’s required for the long run.
Put the two together and the obituary draft that comes out of Heardstone is no longer a starting point you have to rewrite from scratch. It is close enough to your voice that the edit takes ten minutes, and the family hears you in it. Same tool. Different result, because of what sits behind it.
Use the tool. The tool is the easy part, and everyone will have it by the end of the year. Software that writes is becoming as common as software that schedules. The advantage goes to the owners who did the slower work of teaching it who they are, what they sound like, and what their community expects to hear from them. Which is always going to be the real work, it’s just that AI makes it so much easier to do so much more of this work.
That slower work is what I help funeral homes do. Building a voice guide and a content vault is now a core part of how I coach owners and train preneed agents. If you want to see what yours would look like, reach out and we will start with the way you already talk.
-John