AI companions/heroes marketplace for parents and kids
Hello Indie Hackers đź‘‹
I’m Patrick — dad to Chris and maker of Tale Craft. With slight hesitation, but also on good grounds, I dare say: parenting 2.0 maaay be here. It’s either that or just “aj aj magic” as my son calls it.
If you’re after hard facts only, here’s the technical and features overview: https://talecraft.me/media/technical-overview
and here youtube demo: https://youtu.be/Wm5f2l8WEzc
TL;DR: Nearly a hundred acting voices 🎙️ are available with characters already in the marketplace — easily expandable by users creating their own. You’ll also find stories, coloring books, audiobooks, and themed songs. The idea is to give parents a copilot-like 🤖 experience — your child entertained and guided by a hero/companion who’s actually channeling you. Upload knowledge files and control them via the WhatsApp 💬 parent channel.
What Tale Craft is after a year of development:
Tools to help with tantrums
A way to teach empathy and emotional control
Your agent in live of kids who want independence — and they want it now! 🙂
Fun afternoons with coloring books and learning songs
Custom stories from your child’s wildest ideas, plus audiobooks for those extra-long days
Think of it as the copilot marketplace for parents — with a story generator that keeps even long tales consistent in text and images, powered by agentic workflows, prompt chains, and plenty of evaluations - all built on solid principles and scalable architecture. For a more personal take, here’s a parent-to-parent letter:🔗 https://talecraft.me/media/hello-world
I’d love your feedback here or through the app’s feedback tool. Also, I’m looking for a co-founder with strong marketing skills.
Thanks for all the feedback! Since I’m mostly focusing on getting this in front of people, I figured it’s a good time to think about what’s next. Perhaps there are parents here who could share their thoughts or ideas.
Some feature ideas I have:
Calm Castle – a kind of Headspace for kids, but with animated characters
Games Portal – not yet sure what kind of games or in what format
Any ideas or opinions you may have would be much appreciated!
Hey Patrick,
This looks really impressive — love how you’re combining tech with parenting in such a creative way. The mix of stories, coloring books, and AI companions feels like a practical tool for both fun and learning. I can see this being super helpful for parents dealing with kids’ energy and emotions.
Wishing you the best with Tale Craft — excited to see where you take it!
Thanks for all the kind words! Seeing so many 'AI slop' comments elsewhere, this Indie Hackers community feels refreshing and genuinely constructive for a change.
Hey Patrick, I love this. My kids are too old for it now, but I can definitely imagine them being all-in on something like this back in the day. I've done a lot of design work for kids and my current project, Persimi, (check it out here) is using AI personas in a very different but also identical way.
The problem we face in that regard is having little control over what the AI communicates. We can put up a million guardrails, but there's forever that lurking question of what MIGHT still get through under some bizarre circumstance.
I'm going to send you feedback through the site and share a couple of things I'm doing with Persimi under the hood. If you'd like to compare notes, reach out.
Hey Jeff, totally get the concern. One thing that can help here is using Evals—basically unit tests for AI prompts. You run them repeatedly with a mix of “should pass” and “should fail” cases, knowing only a set percentage will succeed. Over time, they help validate and monitor both what you expect and what you don’t expect the model to say. Definitely worth building an eval for every key behavior or safeguard - super usefull when you upgrade to new model and want to see if things by some random chance didnt get worse now (happened to me few times, sometimes new version of model is just chatier at same time getting worse in instruction following, happened to me with one of Gemini model I use in feedback loops for story illustrations ). Persimi looks interesting, do you have an idea board for it by any chance? https://www.indiehackers.com/idea-board/CeNv8cmdtLHseXfzkSdV
I do! https://www.indiehackers.com/idea-board/H8KfzUwhD4YCHVucKvTI
Yeah, reliance on the AI model presents a ton of challenges. But you're right that some guardrails and evaluation loops (with the right reporting and fall-back actions) are a pretty strong preventative. I've pushed my AI personas in some pretty weird directions trying to 'break' them, and so far, so good.
As with anything for kids, make sure there is enough security built into place, especially with rogue user marketplace!
That’s very important, I agree. That’s why everything is in Google Cloud behind Firebase — they are really good with security. I did everything I could to add guardrails to the AI and ensure security for both the client app and the backend API. Time will tell if this was enough. Thanks for the great advice.
Worthy description by texts and maps showing easy marketplace operations and marvelous view or guilt free parenting with better future.
I think it does not have the market in china, since using doubao can freely generate and find the cartoon characters freely.
doubao is released by bytedance company
I did check briefly and it looks like they cover broad spectrum of needs and dont focus on children story telling, Tale Craft characters are rooted in stories parents create or get from marketplace + I think doubao has only 20 voices where Talecraft is nearly 100 hand picked to be just right for all stories: goblins, wizards, princesses etc. I will research doubao a bit more in case I am off here
very cool idea, did you built it with validation from the market ?
Hey, no this was kind of an app I build for my self but me being me as soon as i realized potentiall I started expanding and rewritten it to something more sacalable. I did talk to a lot of Parents I know about it and feedback has been applied already
This is a wicked idea ! I'm keen to try this out with the bandito duo I have
There is a Cowboys category in Marketplace exactly for them two! Share as soon as you create them 🤞🤞🤞 If you would be willing to provide some feedback I can put free credits to your account, jsut ping me your username to patrick@talecraft dot me (not allowed to paste my email yet aparently) that goes for anyone else willing to try it out here, please just let me know