Shhhh

A storytelling agent that keeps your kid engaged without turning their brain into mush, puts them in a driver’s seat of the story and teaches them a valuable lesson.

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Inspiration

Most of out team members are parents, so it's a little scary for us to often run out of ideas for engaging our kids and keeping up with their new interests. We are also terrified of the sweeping wave of harmful, addictive children apps and content. We want the best for our kids, and that's why we're building "Shhhh".

What it does

"Shhhh" is a storytelling agent that can generate infinitely many stories about whatever is more interesting to your kid at the time. The stories can include a valuable lesson that you want your kid to learn. All the stories feature your child as the main character and has them making branching choices that drive the story forward. Using ElevenLabs technology you can add a custom voice to narrate the story, so if a dad or mom is away, the kids don't have to miss on having a quality connection with the parent.

How we built it

We built this using Node.js, MongoDB, and Angular, with GitHub Actions taking care of automation so everything runs smoothly. Our infrastructure is deployed on GCP and Vercel, ensuring speed and reliability. To bring stories to life, we use Eleven Labs for natural-sounding voice narration, Fal AI to generate stunning visuals, and Gemini AI to craft engaging stories. It all comes together seamlessly to create an immersive experience.

Challenges we ran into

One of the trickiest parts was dealing with how long it took to generate images and audio - it felt like waiting for a slow printer in the 90s. Thankfully, we found some clever workarounds. Fal.ai lets us tweak image settings to speed things up, and with some fine-tuning, we got the image generation API running much smoother. But the real MVP? Eleven Labs’ streaming audio feature, which meant we didn’t have to sit around waiting for full audio files to generate. Now, stories come to life way faster, and we’re not forcing kids watching the spinner all the time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re really proud of how smoothly everything runs - it works like a charm! There’s also a ton of personalization, which makes it even more fun. What we’re especially excited about is how the child becomes the main character in the story. They get to choose what happens next, putting them right in the middle of the action. Honestly, even one of our team member’s kids was completely hooked on the solution, which is pretty cool to see!

What we learned

  • Kids crave personalization - they engage more when they’re part of the story
  • AI can create unique narratives while keeping child safety in mind
  • Storytelling tech needs to balance engagement with simplicity
  • Parent involvement matters in digital storytelling
  • Real-time story adaptation keeps kids interested
  • UX for children requires special consideration
  • Voice interaction enhances the experience
  • Testing with actual kids provides invaluable insights
  • Privacy concerns are crucial in children’s apps
  • Cross-platform compatibility is essential

What's next for Shhhh

  • User-friendly UX.
  • Support for multiple kids.
  • Faster image generation, including animated images
  • Adding video and motion to the images, to make it even more engaging and interesting
  • Featuring your kid as part of the images
  • User testing with parents (and kids!) to see how they like it and if they want a product like this to come to life

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