From an idea to a printed book
Your child says an idea aloud. Talebrix helps shape it, then writes and illustrates the story and is being developed to print onto a pre-bound blank picture book, with their name as the author. This is the experience we are developing.
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Your child starts with an idea
A dragon, a rocket or the cat next door. Your child decides what their book will be about.
They say what they want a story about
Press the button and your child says what they want. It can be as loose as “a dragon one”.
It asks who it is about
Then a handful of questions — who it is about, where it happens, what goes wrong, how it ends. Each answer is theirs, and whatever they leave is filled in.
It prints onto a pre-bound blank book
Pre-bound blank books made with 250gsm smooth paper, printed page by page. The complete mechanism and durability remain to be validated.
The book comes out of the front
148 × 210 mm portrait, 26 pages, a custom cover. Their name appears as the author. The finished story is read on paper; complete-cycle timings remain to be validated.
What the screen shows along the way
Not every screen, but every kind of one: an invitation, a question, a wait, a cover to approve. None of them scrolls, and none of them is the story. That is printed.
It waits
One invitation, and nothing else on the screen. Nothing starts until the red button is pressed.
Who is the story about?
The first question, asked out loud. Anyone or anything, the screen says, and the answer is spoken.
Listening
Press, say it, press again. The screen shows the question and the word Listening.
Where does it happen?
A place, real or made up. Each question gets a screen like this one, and the questions come to an end.
The story is written
A short wait with one picture, and a length of time a child understands.
The cover, to approve
The title and the cover appear before anything is printed. One press makes it a book.
Ready to print
The cover is shown before printing, with the invitation to press the button to print it.
Your book is ready
Time to read it together. From here on, the story is on paper.
The screens are the machine’s own, drawn by its software as it stands today. The design may change before it ships.
A handful of questions, not a conversation
The exchange has a shape and a finish, because the point is a book rather than a thing that keeps talking. The display is the only screen involved, and it is never the thing anybody reads from.
What is doing the writing
The planned system uses cloud services for speech recognition, story writing and illustration. Speech is sent over an encrypted connection. Audio deletion and no provider training on children’s speech or story content are requirements to verify before launch.
There is no library of stories inside Talebrix and no set of templates with a gap for a name. What gets sent is your child’s answers and the ages Talebrix has been set to; what comes back is the words, the pictures and the cover artwork. Talebrix is being developed to print them directly onto a pre-bound blank book.
So the division of labour is this, and we would rather write it down than let you discover it. The model does the writing and the drawing, and it fills in whatever your child does not say. What it will not do is write over what they did say — who is in it, where it happens, what goes wrong, what it is called. The more of that they give it, the more of the book is theirs.
How the reading level gets chosen
You tell Talebrix once who lives in the house and how old they are, and it writes to fit. The same idea comes out as two quite different books for a four year old and an eight year old — shorter sentences and more repetition at the young end, richer vocabulary and a real turn at the older end.
That is a setting on Talebrix, not an account, and nothing about it is asked for by this website or stored on it.
Story Packs
A Story Pack supplies 4 pre-bound blank books. A parent inserts each book through the same bottom-front slot used to retrieve it. The characters and setting come from the child’s ideas, not a fixed cast on the pack. Ink pricing and final contents are to be confirmed.
The target price for material for 4 books is £15, which works out at £3.75 in pack material per book. Talebrix arrives with 4 books in the box, and you buy another pack when you want to make more books, or you do not. There is no subscription and no recurring charge of any kind.
The specifications, such as they are
It runs off an external 24 V supply and stays plugged in, the way a kettle does. There is no battery to run down in the middle of a story, and nothing to remember to charge.
Every figure is design intent rather than a measurement taken off a finished unit. They are set out on the specifications page, along with the consequence of the section above: Talebrix needs wi-fi, because the writing and the drawing happen on our servers rather than inside the machine in your child's bedroom.
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