Teller Stories
AI-powered storytelling that turns your photos into personalized stories.
Hypothesis
Personalized content is the next evolution in media. Media has gone from edited and linear, to recorded and saved, to recommended and shared. Personalization algorithms will give way to personalized content — content that features the viewer and their world. I'm not sure how much space it will take up, and professionally-created content will always dominate, just as linear still has its place today, but personalized content will continue to grow.
Timeline
6 weeks
The Problem
After we travel, I always make a photo book. And although the photos bring back memories, I started thinking about how AI could recontextualize my memories in a fun way.
The Solution
Teller Stories turns your photos into short stories you'll actually want to read, keep, and share. Upload one to eight photos, name your characters, add an optional note for context, and pick a genre. The app generates a complete, personalized story with your original photos woven throughout the narrative. A morning walk becomes a children's story. A vacation becomes a sci-fi adventure. A date night becomes a romantic comedy. The photos stay yours. The story is something new.
How AI Is Used
My focus here was on quality, so the AI is told to mimic famous authors from each genre (again, with AI, context is the key to quality). Claude analyzes the uploaded photos to understand the people, setting, and mood in each image, then writes a complete short story calibrated to the chosen genre. The narrative is structured so that each photo appears at the right moment in the story, making the images feel like they were always part of the telling.
Tech Stack
Next.js, Expo, React Native, Supabase, Claude API, RevenueCat, Vercel.
What I Learned
"AI slop" can be avoided by carefully choosing clear references. And, while at first people were surprised by the quality and found joy in the experience, even sharing them with friends and family, it proved to be a novelty experience.
Still, this was my first end-to-end app with account creation and a monetization strategy. So that experience was invaluable.