Do you read books or tell stories to your child at night?
Record yourself with our free mobile app.
Let your child fall asleep to the comforting voice of their loved ones with a playlist of stories.
With a free account, your stories are safely saved to the Cloud and automatically synced with your family.
We have built the app while using it everyday with our 2 kids. It has been made to be simple and fast to use, while having the features you really need.
Up to 10 hours of recording
Leave the device within 1m (3 feet)
Continue long stories later
Search, sort and filter your collection
On-the-fly playlist creation
Stories saved to the Cloud (requires an account)
Control the playback
Stream to a wireless speaker
Or leave your device in the kid's room, out of reach
Start without an account
Account creation is free
Passwordless, just a link in an email to click
Create or join up to 3 families
Invite via email
All members see all the stories automatically
More plans may come later
You can request your account deletion at any moment in the application. If you are using the application without an account, you only need to uninstall the application from your devices.
The deletion of your account is immediate and cannot be reverted. It will require to re-login with an email link to confirm your identity.
The application will delete everything related to your account, the stories you recorded and the families you created. We will not keep any data related to your account once the process is completed.
It will also remove your account from any family you have joined as a member. As a consequence, your eventual family members will be kicked out of the families you have created and won't be able to see or play the stories you have recorded.
byMiguel VazquezMarch 7th 2023
Over the last 3 years, we recorded 220 stories for a total recording time of 42 hours. Our kids fall asleep every night with a playlist. Here is how we did it.
We always read a book to our kid at night before going to bed. When we are about to read a new book, we grab our phone, open FamilyTale and press the record button. We keep the phone within 1 meter (3 feet) of us. The recording does not have to be of great quality, the kid can interrupt the narration and ask questions, or sneeze, they always love listening to it afterwards. We usually read for between 5 to 15min. If the book is too long, the app allows to continue the story later. We have a few stories that are more than an hour long, they took up to 7 nights to complete. Over the last 3 years, we recorded over 220 stories for a total of around 42 hours.
We installed a smart speaker in each kid's room. Every day, once the kids are in bed, we open the app, queue some stories in the playlist and stream it to the right smart speaker. Our kids often tell us which stories they want. They fall asleep listening to the playlist, and with time we learned how long per kid the playlist must be. When a kid wakes up at night, scared by a nightmare, we grab our device on the nightstand and play a story or two on the smart speaker remotely. They generally fall back to sleep, reassured by our voice, without requiring us to stand up.
Our parents are members of our family. When the kids go spend the night at their places, grand-parents can play any of the stories we recorded. Thanks to the Family, they see automatically all the stories we recorded, even the recent ones. The kids often tell them what they want to listen to, and if they read a new book with them, they ask them to record it. When the grand-parents record a new book read at their place, we can play it the next day.
Our son became at an early age very keen to listen to stories we told from child books. One day, we had to drive for 10 hours straight with him. He got bored quickly and requested stories. We only had a couple of books with us, but he did not seem to be bored out of repetition.
After having told him for the 10th time the same story, we tried out to record ourselves with the voice recorder app from our phone. The first 5min story was created and he listened, to our surprise, to it for half an hour straight. The voice recorder app was clearly not made for that, we had to restart the playback manually after each story ended, they was no direct way to share stories between the family members. We quickly created the first simple prototype of FamilyTale to implement the lacking features of the voice recorder.
Recording yourself is not something easy to get used to, it is a new habit to build. No parent can tell before trying if FamilyTale will become important for them. That is why you can start using the app without an account and why we consider it must be free.
FamilyTale is only financed by visual advertisement banners.
We will never play any audio ad to your kids, NEVER.
As Cloud storage is no cheap, we have to limit the recording time to 10 hours for now. We might introduce paid subscriptions later to allow storing more recording.