DF: Bedtime Stories for Kids

Inspiration

Hi :) Another Bedtime Stories App? You are right, there are way too many on the App Store already! I feel like I have tried them all, some with beautiful designs, cool features, etc .. but somehow they aren't so good storytellers as I would've expected.

So I wanted to make another one, to focus on actually good stories. It's far from perfect, but I've tried to use the most advanced models for text, image and audio, some of them very expensive, searched for tips&tricks, and just tried a lot, to make it good.

The app allows you to make stories with you and your kid as characters. Both text & images are personalized and you can choose between educational and fictional topics. Stories are also cached offline to read on the go.

I really hope you like it! :) Best on iPad

Challenges we ran into

As it turns out, it is not so easy to let LLMs be creative storytellers. With equal input, it is very likely the story generated is exactly the same. For example, I did not want the same moral for each story, neither every detail of the characters always included. I wanted it to be fun & educational at the same time.

Also, I unfortunately couldn't reach a single real user. I think that is the case because there are so many similar apps already on the App Store. Nonetheless, it was really fun to build!

How I built it

The App was created using Swift and SwiftUI, backend with Python Django. Models are from OpenAI, Eleven Labs, Anthropic, Mistral and others.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I think the stories are actually kinda good, paired with high quality image and audio models makes the experience really great.

What's next for DF: Bedtime Stories for Kids

I want to highlight text that's read by the audio narration to make it a little easier to read along, and maybe help with learning to read. Also, I hope I can replace the models with cheaper ones in the future, right now stories are quite expensive.

Built With

• anthropic
• elevenlabs
• openai
• swift
• swiftui