AI in practice

AI storytelling app Oscar brings sweet dreams, one bedtime story at a time

Harry Verity
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Midjourney prompted by THE DECODER

Proving that nothing is safe from the AI revolution, Oscar is about to turbocharge your child's bedroom with personalized stories and images generated by GPT 3.5 and Midjourney.

Oscar Bedtime Stories is an app that promises to let children, their parents, or their pets become the main characters in their bedtime stories. It uses Open AI's GPT technology to generate the stories and Midjourney's image generation software.

Bringing stories to life with characters

Users start by inputting which characters should be part of the story and then selecting what animal the main character should adopt, be it a fox, dragon, elf, a unicorn, and more.

Stories take 30 seconds to generate and are illustrated with simple pictures. If the bear is going into space, then we see him dressed in an astronaut's uniform. The stories are presented with a clean and simple UX: think the carousel swipe-over function on Instagram.

Stories and matching images are presented in an easy-to-read swipe interface. | Image: Heyqq

Pricing and language support

Users can save their stories to be re-told to their children another day, saving them up in a bank or generating a new one. Each new story costs coins which can be purchased in blocks of 5, 25 or 50.

Stories can be generated in multiple languages, currently French, Italian, Spanish and German, perfect for parents with bilingual children. You can download it here for Apple devices.

Future plans

In the future, it would be interesting to see if the stories incorporate AI voice technology and produce more sophisticated stories for older children. The company is currently working on training Oscar with GPT-4 which has just been released.

Oscar is the brainchild of Heyqq, an Austrian company. Their other products currently in development include a social audio app with 1:1 audio calls connecting users with experts on particular subjects.

The founders are Matthias Neumayer whose background is in film and brand management and Dima Rubanov, a software engineer. The app was named after Oscar, the godchild of one of the founders, who wanted a new story every night and was no longer satisfied with the existing books.

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