What features would parents value in an AI storytelling/companion app for kids? | Hacker News Reader

What features would parents value in an AI storytelling/companion app for kids?

I’m working on a project where kids can talk with AI companions (dragons, wizards, princesses, goblins) whose voices are generated with ElevenLabs. Parents have a control panel where they can manage the characters and upload knowledge. The system can also generate audiobooks, coloring pages, and themed songs, all tied to the stories.

Some ideas I’m considering:

Calm Castle: a calming, Headspace-like mode for kids

Games Portal: but I’m unsure what kinds of games would make sense

I’d love to hear from parents (or others with ideas) about what features would be most valuable.

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Maybe the ability to explain the origin, lore, etymology of the fictional characters and their objects and languages much like some of the lore wiki sites. Also back stories, why the characters behave the way they do. Kids often ask questions that a book does not directly answer yet the answer often exist online and sometimes requires an adult to understand the context and reasoning. Perhaps the AI could literally ELI5.

If a story has it's origin in older and darker fairy tails the child could have the option to hear the original and scarier unredacted version of the story or back-story. Disney almost started to go this direction with Maleficent.

Another feature could be writing the child's name in the fictional language assuming there is some description and language rules, grammatical structure much like the languages created by J.R.R. Tolkien. Those are full feature complete languages learned and spoken by some people today for fun or to be covert.

We already have this but can be improved based on your feedback: each character has a Name, an Avatar for chats, plus a Description and Behaviour in conversations. I suppose the Description could be split into subsections — for example, Physical Description, Background, and Quirks — to guide the user better instead of leaving it as a plain description.

Stories are build from components: characters, locations, and notes, but they also only have have names and description fields. So, it might be best to split those into subcomponents as well. Brilliant advice — thank you so much!

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