Build Me A Story

Engram Ltd

About this app

Your child says what happens. A whole story comes back - written for their age, illustrated page by page, and saved to read again together.

What they type is never sent to us. The main character's name and the story idea are used to build the story, and for nothing else. There's no sign-up, no tracking, and no data selling.

TWO THINGS TO TYPE, THREE TO CHOOSE

Describe the main character, who can be your own child, and say what the story is about - "a dragon who is afraid of the dark," "Grandpa's shed." Then pick who it's for, how it should look and how long it should run. Your choices are remembered, and one tap fills the form in from your last story.

The words will arrive first, so you can start reading while the robot finishes drawing the pictures. When it's finished it goes into your library.

WRITTEN FOR THE CHILD IN FRONT OF YOU

The age band changes the reading level and the sentence length, not just the number of pages.

• Toddlers (2–3) - one or two very short sentences a page
• Preschool (3–5) - two or three short, simple sentences
• Early readers (4–7) - three or four sentences, and longer words
• Confident readers (6–9) - a real plot, with a beginning, middle and end
• Independent readers (8–11) - longer pages, proper stakes, something to get your teeth into

Choose from one of four art styles. Every page is illustrated in this consistent style, so it hangs together like a real book. Pick short (4–6 pages), medium (6–8) or long (9–12).

IT BEHAVES LIKE A BOOK

• Pages turn on the fold, the way a real page does - and your library of finished stories is a book too.
• In landscape mode you get a proper spread: the words on one side, the picture facing them.
• You can use a pinch gesture to change the text size to suit you and your child.
• Light and dark themes, including on older tablets that have no dark mode of their own.
• Page-turn buttons, text-size buttons and screen-reader labels, for accessibility.

READS BACK OFFLINE

Your child's stories live on the device, pictures and all, and open without a connection. Building a new story needs the internet; reading one you already have does not.

ENGLISH AND GERMAN

The story can be in English or German. The app itself can be English or German as well.

HOW IT WORKS

Stories and pictures are generated from your child's request by an AI model. Every story is one of a kind - the same idea will never give the same one twice.

The model is told to write for the age you choose and its own safety filters apply on top; neither is perfect, so we recommend that your child is supervised while using the app. Anything factual in a story is invention rather than fact, and this is an app for an adult to read alongside a child.

PRIVACY, IN PLAIN TERMS

• The character's name and the story idea are never sent to us, and appear in no usage statistic, diagnostic log or crash report.
• No advertising, no profiling, no third-party trackers. No advertising ID, no Android ID, nothing derived from your hardware.
• What is recorded is the shape of what you did rather than the content - how often a story is finished, which options were picked, what failed and never identifies you. This helps us to improve the app for the future.
• One switch in Settings turns off recording even this limited data.
• We do not and will not sell data or usage information to any third parties. Nothing goes to advertisers or data brokers.

FREE

Free, with no ads and no subscription. We expect to charge for building new stories at some point; the stories you have already built will stay readable for free.

Privacy policy: https://www.buildmeastory.com/privacy.php

What’s new

The app is currently free to use, with no ads and nothing sold to anyone. It's a new app and we want to see how it's used in the real world.

It costs us money to generate each story, so at some point we'll need to start charging (still with no ads, and still nothing sold). When we do, it will be free to continue reading all the stories that you have already built.