LunaTale - Interactive Story App for Kids

Inspiration

It started with a simple observation: our kids don’t just want to listen to stories—they want to live inside them. They want to ask characters questions, imagine different outcomes, and bring their own ideas into the world. That’s what sparked LunaTale.

We’re starting with an interactive storybook experience - rich visuals, voice-driven character conversations, and playful scenes. But the real vision goes much further: to build an evolving universe of stories where emotional intelligence, creativity, and real-world learning are interwoven. A space where AI helps guide exploration, but kids remain the authors of their journey.

As AI advances, kids won’t need static, linear content. They’ll need dynamic, adaptive worlds. With LunaTale, we want to offer more than "education" or "entertainment" - we want to offer agency. Kids will build empathy by making choices, explore science by asking questions, and develop resilience by trying and failing in safe, magical environments.

We believe stories are the most human way to learn. LunaTale is our attempt to bring that belief to life -with the best of what AI and imagination can offer.

What it does

LunaTale is an interactive web app that combines beautiful visuals, animated effects, and conversational AI to create a magical storytelling experience. Kids can:

• Browse through a gallery of illustrated stories
• Read stories scene-by-scene at their own pace, with full control to go back and forth
• Talk to story characters through voice conversations with lip-synced avatars
• Jump seamlessly to the next adventure or revisit their favorites The app is best suited for desktop and Ipad devices but can adapt to different screen sizes and provides smooth animations and transitions throughout the journey.

How we built it

Stories

We built GPT Assistants with human in the loop to help us with story arc, narrative, characters, dialogue script, and image prompts generation. By inputting these image prompts to Google Imagen4 and Veo3, we generated images and videos aligned with dialogue scripts. For audio, we augmented dialogues scripts with audio tags to help guide delivery when generating speech using Elevenlabs - v3 was fantastic for adding details like background voices, laughter, and emotions.

Web App

In parallel, we started thinking about the web app. We didn't have any design, only a high-level vision for the UI/UX we wanted to build. When we provided it to bolt.new, it built a beautiful prototype based on our instructions very quickly. It was a magical experience right from the start. Bolt's integration with Netlify and Supabase made developer experience even more magical - we were able to deploy a working prototype in minutes. All that was left for us to do was to upload the story content to Supabase and tweak the UI/UX details. We iterated through these using Bolt very quickly.

One of the UX design principles we tried to follow was to keep the UX as clean and simple as possible so we ended up stripping away a lot of UI elements that were not critical - especially when we realized through user testing that kids could easily figure out how to navigate the product on their own. We realized kids naturally swipe and tap to navigate stories and scenes - they figured it out way faster than we expected.

Challenges we ran into

The initial challenge was consistent image generation for stories. We eventually figured out a way to improve visual consistency across scenes and now we have even more ideas to further improve this aspect of story generation.

Another major hurdle was finding the right conversational AI solution. Most existing tools are built for business use cases, not for kids wanting to chat with storybook characters. We had to experiment with multiple platforms before landing on something that worked. Initially, we wanted to use TavusAI but concluded it was more focused on business use cases. We started with Elevenlabs Conversational AI product but we wanted to provide a visual experience to conversations as well, so we pivoted to combining Simli with Elevenlabs, which really elevated the experience for kids.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of what we were able to build in about 2 weeks while having full-time jobs, thanks to the amazing developer experience that Bolt provided.

We also got positive feedback from the kids that helped us test the product. Observing their engagement and interested in exploring more stories that are coming soon, as well as seeing their smiling faces when experiencing the stories and talking to characters, these moments inspired us to continue iterating on the product.

What we learned

Kids are way more sophisticated users than we give them credit for. They don't need hand-holding through every interaction - they figure things out quickly and often prefer having control. We initially thought we needed to add scene navigation buttons but observed that kids figured it the navigation quickly without any hints.

Keeping the UI clean helped kids focus on the story instead of being distracted by non-essential UI elements.

Real user feedback beats assumptions every time. What we thought kids would want versus what they actually wanted were often completely different. We hesitated between auto-progression from scene-to-scene but we weren't sure assuming kids would want a slower pace and more control of the progression. But our observation suggests that kids would actually prefer auto-progression because they have been tapping to progress to the next scene as soon as the current scene's audio narration/script ends. That's one of the UX changes we're going to test next.

Visual consistency in AI-generated content is still a challenge, but we have an idea for how to improve it.

At the current state of AI, we concluded that compelling story generation with rich visual and audio components can be automated although it still requires human in the loop at some stages.

What's next for LunaTale

We're planning to support more languages, build story-based learn-through-play experience for kids to progress through academic curriculum, allow kids to collaboratively create their own stories, and allow their parents/teachers to create stories for their kids, and enable characters to have memory so that character interactions feel natural to kids.

Before launching the product publicly, we're also planning to adjust the product to comply with security, privacy, and child safety regulations. Furthermore, we want to publish it to mobile app stores.

Our mission is to help kids learn STEM, Humanities and Social Sciences as well as develop their emotional intelligence through engaging narratives, character interactions, and collaboration. We believe AI will become a very effective learning companion for kids and will help foster curiosity, agency, resilience, and creativity.

P.S. We will likely change the name of the product from LunaTale to something else as if was the name we just picked quickly for the hackathon and didn't give it much thought :)

Built With

• bolt.new
• elevenlabs
• react
• simli
• supabase
• typescript
• veo3