Enliven

Inspiration

Sometimes you want to listen to a book, but the audiobook just doesn’t exist. We wanted to fix that. Enliven was created to bring books to life automatically and then we thought: why stop there? If you could interact with the characters, ask questions, and go deeper, the experience becomes way more engaging. That’s where the name Enliven comes from: to give life to something.

What it does

Enliven turns written stories into interactive audiobooks with unique character voices. You can pause playback, talk to characters, and even start calls with them. They respond in their own voice, using story context and memory.

How we built it

We built a pipeline to parse text, detect narration vs character dialogue, assign voices, and track character identity and memory. On top of that, we added interactive dialogue so users can hold conversations with characters in real time.

Challenges we ran into

Matching voices to characters and keeping tone and personality consistent was the toughest challenge. We solved it using character memory that updates throughout the story, plus lots of debugging and iteration under time pressure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For our first hackathon, we shipped a working prototype that not only voices books but makes them interactive. Seeing it actually run end-to-end was a great feeling.

What we learned

We learned how to work as a team under tight time constraints, tackle bugs fast, and push ambitious ideas into a real prototype.

What's next for Enliven

Future directions include better emotional voices, longer stories, user-uploaded books, and richer character personalities. There’s also potential for accessibility, education, and new forms of storytelling.