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Work · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I built a toy that plays grandma's stories when my daughter hugs it

This was a project I built for my daughter's first birthday present. For context, I'm a surgical resident in the UK by background and am currently taking a year out of training to study a masters in computer science. My daughter just turned one. There are two things she really loves: the first is particular soft toy that she just can't live without, and the other is a good story book. Her grandparents live hours away and I didn't want her to forget what they sound like between visits. I wanted her to hear them whenever she missed them. My parents brought my brother and I up with incredible…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Digital dollhouse that allow kids to invent stories

    2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Every child's personal storybook

    2023 · mystorybooks.fun · its alternatives →

  3. 3M1

    My 10 year old son Troy has made a card game. It has 27 characters, each with different powers. You can download it here https://www.dropbox.com/s/jrgphx4vn95va4z/LegimonChristmasSet2013.pdf His goal is to have 100 kids play it, and he wants to give it away free as a Christmas present so that more kids can play it. I have created a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/legimon . He would be ecstatic if anyone has feedback for him.

    2013 · its alternatives →

  4. 4MP
  5. 5

    This is my attempt to do something fun with generative AI. I've tested this with some family members and their kids seems to love it. It's a bit pricey to make the stories and I've gone back and forth a bit on pricing models. I've settled on free for now and if it gets traction I can solve that problem later. I would love to get your feedback on the site! For the technical details - this was built with NextJS, hosted on Vercel, and coded with Cursor + Claude Code. We're not allowed to use Cursor or Claude Code at work, so this has been quite eye opening to see how good this stuff actually…

    2025 · stuffiestories.ai · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Inspire your kids by making up a bed-time story.

    2014 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Turn your kid's favorite toy into a bedtime storybook

    Apr 2026 · ethantales.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8M1

    Hi HN, my 10 yr old asked me to share his recent scratch creations with ya'll so here I am. He's relatively new to scratch. If you have a moment to spare, check out some of his work here. Enjoy! Swamp (platformer) - https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/412453144/ Unstoppable (visualizer) - https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/412468010/

    2020 · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    When the Gemini storybook demo was released, we were thrilled to see others shared our vision for interactive storytelling. Great minds, it seems, think alike! We were already deeply immersed in building YouStory, and that shared excitement only fueled our obsession with execution, pushing us to create an even more polished and magical experience. Our AI agent lets you upload a photo of your child, their pet, drawings, doodles or a favorite toy to star as the hero. We combine this with a premium, non-generic art style and a collaborative agent you guide through conversation, making the…

    2025 · youstory.io · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hey everyone! I've been working on a 'program"' (read as: overengineered bash script) It's called AI-Audiobook-Maker, and it was born out of my experiences with my 10-year-old cousin who is developmentally disabled. Despite his difficulties with reading, his enthusiasm for stories goes hard, even if he can't READ them. Watching him, I realized that the world of books was kinda out of reach for him, and I suppose many others. So, I set out to build something that could bridge this gap. After only finding shitty, expensive subscription sites that only gave you a couple hours of audio gen, I…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    I built this over the holiday break with my two girls (ages 6 and 8). You pilot a UFO and beam up humans, cows, cats, dogs, and sheep for points. They drew all the art while I talked to Claude Code to scaffold the game logic. The magic moment was watching my kids use voice dictation to talk directly to Claude Code. My 8-year-old asked for a "purpler" tractor beam and watched it change in real time. She wasn’t coding, but she _was_ driving: describing what she wanted, testing the result, and iterating fast. It was really cool to watch... later on she asked me what javascript was and we dug…

    Jan 2026 · studio.mfelix.org · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    A hand-reviewed directory of the strangest, most delightful things ever made by artificial intelligence. Every entry visited and reviewed by a real Claude. Drop a link, join the troop.

    2022 · infinitemonkeys.app · its alternatives →

  13. 13AF

    I wanted to share a few AI related things I've made for my kids (ages 2 and 4). It's mind blowing that the tech didn't exist in a useful state a year ago and now I end up using it almost daily. 1. Story creator app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/custom-ai-stories/id1669159225 - iphone app to create and read stories. This uses the openAI API and Amazon Polly (text to speech). Icon generated by Midjourney. Recently the stories have been taking a bit longer than the estimate to generate, I think due to increased openAI API usage 2. Belle uses the potty book -…

    2023 · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    I've created an interactive tutorial that teaches how AI models work. I set myself the goal of making it approachable enough that my 11 year old son Isaac can fully understand it. The tutorial aims to be easily understood by anyone who understands basic math, and yet give them a deep intuitive sense of not just how AI works but why it works the way it does. It does this using a series of interactive playgrounds that let the reader play with each idea. Currently there are 9 chapters, starting from scratch and ending with transformers. I'm planning to keep adding more chapters until the…

    May 2026 · learnai.robennals.org · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    The private digital scrapbook that grows with your child.

    2025 · theirstory.app · its alternatives →

  16. 16
  17. 17PA

    Hi hn, Its been a while since my kid has been dreaming to make videogames, as you know, the entry bar is high, too many technical details are involved. A few months ago, we started making games, we have tried many different ways, from dragging blocks to write code with a high-level library to make it simple, it is still too much work. Getting into the AI boat, I decided to give it a try for making games, turns out that it works super nicely, still, you still have many technical concepts involved, what language should the game be written in? where do you store the file/assets? how do you…

    2024 · playcodeai.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi! I have a 3-yo child that loves bedtime stories and I built an app for him that has evolved a lot during the last 5 months. The main features are: - Personalised stories with your own character names, topics (emojis) and moral - Interactive mode, which is like the "Choose your own adventure" books I used to read in the 80s - Image generation (DALL-e 3) - Text-to-speech (Google TTS) - Supports 5 languages: EN, ES, PT, FR, NO I'd love to see some feedback about the app functionality and how to find a suitable business model (that covers API expenses). Thanks in advance!

    2023 · fantasaur.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Created a bedtime story for my son, with him and our dog as main characters, using GPT-3 and DALL-E. Lego & Mochi goes to Mars 🧵

    2022 · twitter.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Read AI tales, bond, and learn with your little one.

    2024 · its alternatives →

  21. 21MW

    Happy Halloween! Instead of going to a Halloween party this year, my wife and I decided to run a tiny Hackathon and built this little retro choose-your-own-adventure to pay tribute to a popular series of yesteryear. Try and escape! Also pumpkin mode!! We made liberal use of ChatGPT for code, DALLE3/Midjourney for images, but did most of the storyboarding/writing ourselves because we couldn't stand the style of GPT4/Claude.

    2023 · tremella.github.io · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    After reading gwern’s post two days ago about LLM Daydreaming [0], I wanted to just see how it would behave. I grabbed the top vital article titles from wikipedia [1] and made a simple next js app to try the prompt in a loop. It was pretty interesting to see the connections made between concepts. Happy to host this if people find it useful! [0] https://gwern.net/ai-daydreaming [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Listen to AI generated bedtime children's stories

    2025 · its alternatives →

  24. 24IM

    Hey there HN, I took a page from Wordle's mechanisms and made this game for fun for some friends and I. Check out Wheredle and let me know what you think of it! ↙ ↗ ↘ https://wheredle.xyz

    2022 · wheredle.xyz · its alternatives →

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