Taleium , home page
Why this exists

A typesetter, not a co-author

There is no shortage of things that will write a story for a child. This is not one of them.

The problem with a machine that writes stories

Ask one for a bedtime story and you get a bedtime story. It is fine. It is also nothing to do with your child, who watched it appear and had no more part in it than they would in a television programme. Nothing was decided, nothing was argued over, and nothing is theirs at the end.

The interesting part of making up a story with a child is not the prose. It is the bit where they say the door leads to the sea and you say what, the whole sea, and they say yes and there are stairs. Most parents run out of road somewhere after that, usually around the third night, because inventing a plot on demand at seven in the evening is genuinely hard.

So the split is deliberate

Your family decides what happens. Taleium writes it down properly, in the right words for the child it is for, and keeps track of everything that has happened so far so that chapter fourteen still knows about the stairs.

It will offer three ways a story could go if you ask it to, and it never picks one, never ends a story, and never writes a chapter nobody asked for. The moment it starts choosing, it has taken the good part.

Built for two people at one screen

There are no child accounts, no chat, no profiles and no way for anybody to contact anybody. It is a parent and a child at the same screen, which is both the safest arrangement and the one that makes it worth doing at all.

Who makes it

Taleium is made and run by Kabooly Ltd, a small company in England. It is paid for by the families who subscribe to it, which is the whole business model: no advertising, no data sold, and nothing in it that needs a child's attention for any reason other than the story.

Anything you want to ask, write to hello@kabooly.com.

Write a chapter and see