Runewell

Bring any story to life with a cast of voices—yours, family, or friends.

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Inspiration

We were skeptical of audiobooks, and now we have both finished multiple heavy books just on Audible. We realised this really became a huge part in our routine (before sleeping, when walking and doing errands) - and when talking to parents, they told us how great it was. We knew this was a sphere worth making even 100x better.

What it does

Runewell allows you to make your own cast for the stories you love! The special thing about the work we did is that we break down each different characters if a given story, and make a narration with full control over each of them. Given ElenvenLabs capabilities, it is now possible to even have one of those voices be... you, or anyone close to you. Imagine bed time stories for kids, with the voice of the kid as the main character, and the reassuring voice of the parents within the story.

How we built it

For the back-end Data sourcing and ingestion. (Gutenberg Project, Ebooks, Photographs/PDFs) Custom parser which parses, segments and loads any Gutenberg book into ‘Narrative Segments’ Use LLM’s to identify characters and short descriptions about their personality and how their might sound given the context of the story. Create a library of easy to use and voices from the Elevenlabs voice library. Allow users to create their own voices as well to add to the library which is private to them. Generate sound snippets for every narration moment ( every different character narration has a separate sound snippet). All in Golang

For the front-end

  • _ Tech Stack _ react js. Only coded the mobile designs as a start.
  • _ Design _ : all made in figma.
  • _ Product _ : there has been a big emphasis and time spent on design and branding: we are aware that what will make the difference in audience capture is how it feels, how it looks, compared to others.

- _ The Umbrella Concept _ : Runewell can be the umbrella for a lot of distinct products with distinct target audiences. Here, our first MVP was made specifically for parents. The branding and the atmosphere replicates the Old Disney Fairytale vibes, with visual inspirations taken from illuminated medieval manuscript. We wanted to have a branding around wonder, magic, values, beauty. Something that would feel nostalgic and beautiful for the parents too - the very users! We aim to provide a magical experience for both parents and children: a shared feeling of wonder.

Challenges we ran into

On the back-end side It was challenging to create separate snippet sounds for each characters, especially when the story we first picked - the happy prince - has a lot lot lot of them ( a lot of random characters speaking for just once sentence, for an exclamation etc.).

On the front-end side Ppurely time. We have hard-coded most of the data, except the authentication system ( protected vs public routes, session system, logout ), and we sticked to coding the mobile designs only ( outside of login / register page).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Visual Identity We're proud of the visual and design identity we’ve crafted on the go, inspired by The Magician archetype and focused on a unique, profitable niche: children’s stories. We believe this can resonate deeply with parents, allowing them to re-live childhood memories in a modern, yet nostalgic way. We found that wer really wanted an experience which balances cutting-edge tech with a touch of magic and old-school fairytale atmospheres, echoing the wonder and enchantment of timeless storytelling.

What's next for Runewell

We want to continue, probably on the front-end side, we will instead code a native app in Swift: it is faster to design and iterate when only mobile experience is taken into account + native apps are still most natural for parents to discover and use + swift rather than react-native in order to bring the best performance possible given the audio recordings and audio files can impact that a lot.

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