I Built an AI Storytelling App for My Multilingual Family During Maternity Leave
Hi Product Hunt đź‘‹
I’m Myrto, a Senior Product Owner at one of the MBB consulting firms, where I lead SaaS product development and train teams internally on AI applications as part of our AI Black Belt program.
I’m currently on maternity leave, and during month two of newborn life, somewhere between nap schedules, sleepless nights, and building new routines, I started creating something I genuinely needed as a new parent in a multilingual family.
I’m Greek, my husband is Italian, and we live in the UK. We wanted simple, quick stories we could read to our baby in our root languages— especially for moments when family members were reading stories over the phone or video calls.
That small idea became Our Stories.
What started as a simple bedtime story app evolved into:
✨ Bedtime & daytime stories in any language you want
✨ Personalized stories with custom heroes, themes, and topics
✨ Story continuation with recurring characters
✨ Narration so little ones can listen independently
✨ AI-generated illustrations
✨ Tracking language exposure reading time and number of stories read per week
The best product feedback came from other parents around me. Friends started asking:
“Can it narrate the stories on home speaker?”
“Can grandparents use it remotely?”
“Can we keep favorite characters going across stories?”
So the app kept growing.
Next on the roadmap:
🔊 Smart speaker integrations (Alexa/home speakers)
đź“š Print-on-demand illustrated books so favorite stories can live on the shelf
Building this during maternity leave reminded me that some of the best product ideas come from real life frustrations especially the tiny daily moments you never noticed before becoming a parent.
I’m launching Our Stories Our Stories — Multilingual Bedtime Stories for Families on Product Hunt next week -shout out to@Lovable
I’ve had a backlog of ideas for years that I never had time to build — and I’m hoping this season of life finally gives me the chance to bring more of them to life.
Would love your feedback, thoughts, and support ❤️
Replies
Hello, Myrto.
Congrats on the baby and this amazing project! I also have a newborn daughter, so I will face this storytelling challenge very soon.
I heard that language exposure and connection in the first few years are super important for babies. Your app solves a real problem.
From a technical view, storytelling apps have a big challenge: it is very hard to get direct feedback from the real users (the babies). How do you know if a new feature or story is actually working well for them? How do you think about this loop?
Our Stories
Hi @lyshen and congratulations on your daughter as well!
You are asking exactly the right question, because with babies the feedback loop is completely different from a normal consumer app.
Right now my son is only 3 months old, so the signals are subtle. We are doing OPOL (one parent, one language) I speak Greek, my husband speaks Italian, and between us we speak English.
What I realized already is that bedtime stories at this age are much less about “content consumption” and much more about emotional connection, repetition, rhythm, and hearing a parent’s voice.
For example, I like creating tiny stories around daily moments or completely imaginative adventures, for example: Nicholas and the hiccups, Nicholas takes a bath, Nicholas travels to Greece for the first time, or Nicholas travels to space.
The stories themselves become prompts for interaction. I sometimes exaggerate sounds, make animal noises, change my tone of voice, repeat certain words, or react emotionally while reading, and I can already see him responding with smiles, sounds, attention, and recognition.
Honestly, I think an important part of the loop is also whether the parent enjoys reading the story.
If the story feels warm, culturally familiar, funny, or emotionally real to me, that comes through in how I read it. Kids pick up on energy and emotion long before they understand language itself.
That’s also why I built Our Stories. I wanted a tool that helps parents become better storytellers, especially in their own language.
I read that multilingual children benefit hugely from repeated exposure to familiar sounds and words, so interestingly “the same story again” is often more valuable than endless novelty.
As kids grow older, I imagine the feedback loop becomes clearer:
which stories they ask for again, which characters become part of bedtime, which language they emotionally connect with, and whether storytelling becomes a lasting family ritual rather than just another app.
Our Stories
@lyshen One thing I forgot to mention, with babies, engagement is what I consider the feedback loop
Right now I judge features less through explicit “usage metrics” and more through reactions:
smiling, vocalising back, eye contact, staying attentive, recognising repeated sounds, or becoming more animated during certain parts of a story.
And disengagement is feedback too. If he loses focus or stops reacting, I know something about the rhythm, tone, or format probably isn’t resonating.
A good example is narration: the app includes AI narration and he responds well to it, but he very clearly prefers hearing mama read the story aloud. That actually reinforced one of my core product beliefs, the app shouldn’t replace the parent, it should support the parent in becoming the storyteller.
@myrto_skourletou I really deeply appreciate your detailed and insightful answer! Your product philosophy really impresses me, especially the part about keeping parents at the center of the loop.
I also build voice SaaS products. I often see developers just making AI play endless stories, which totally ignores the human connection. You gave me a completely new perspective.
Your design makes parents the main user and evaluator, while AI stays at the edge as a supportive tool to trigger human interaction. This is pure gold.
I also have a personal question about OPOL. Is this method very popular in Europe? Me and my wife speak both Mandarin and Cantonese. Do you think the OPOL approach can help our baby build both language systems smoothly?
Thank you for this amazing conversation!