Teller Family
Turn family photos into illustrated bedtime stories with AI.
Hypothesis
Personalized content is the next evolution in media. Media went from edited and linear, to recorded and saved, to recommended and shared. Next, personalization algorithms will give way to content that features the viewer and their world. I'm not sure how much space it will take up, and professionally made content will always dominate, just as linear still has its place, but personalized content will keep growing.
Timeline
3 weeks
The Problem
Parents want fresh stories to read to their kids, and kids love seeing their own world illustrated: their pets, their house, their family. Most AI story apps generate bland, generic stories.
The Solution
Parents upload family photos, pick a reading level and a genre, and Teller Family generates an illustrated bedtime story that reimagines the child's real world. The genre sets the illustration style.
How AI Is Used
A two-stage pipeline. fal.ai turns family photos into story-ready illustrations, then Claude analyzes those illustrations and writes an age-appropriate story around them. To protect family privacy, the original photos are deleted once the illustrations exist. They're never stored.
Tech Stack
Built as a cross-platform mobile app with a serverless backend and AI services orchestrating the story pipeline.
What I Learned
Getting people to adopt a new app is hard. My problem and hypothesis came from real conversations, but that doesn't guarantee usage. Seeing that firsthand was enlightening.
I also learned how AI sees and processes images, and how it takes the safest path to its goal. Both can stop it from turning a photo into an illustration. This project gave me a much deeper understanding of how AI works.
*I'm a die-hard fan of em dashes — both visually, and as a form of written communication. All em dash placements are my own.