Seven months on from launch, it is probably time to write a proper explanation of what Daily Adventure is for the Story Seeds blog.
Daily Adventure is a free tool we run at Story Seeds that replaces the morning alarm on a Yoto player with a short personalised story. Instead of a beep at 7:15, a child's Yoto greets them by name, tells them about today's weather, mentions whatever is on the family calendar, and reads them a short story written for them that morning. If it is a Tuesday and football practice is after school, the story might be about a fox with football practice. If it is a birthday, there is a nod to it.
It also does evenings. A bedtime companion reads one of the classic stories, Aesop or Grimm or similar, and optionally winds down with a short mindfulness moment narrated by a real person. For older children there is a three-minute age-appropriate news summary pulled from BBC Newsround.
It uses AI only for the parts that can only be done with AI. A language model writes the story overnight, and a synthesised voice reads it in the morning. The voice actors behind those synthesised voices are paid through ElevenLabs' licensed programme. Anything that does not need AI is done by real people: mindfulness is recorded by volunteers in a room, and Newsround content is curated by hand.
Daily Adventure supports English, French, and Spanish, each written natively. It currently works for one or two children per household.
Daily Adventure has its own blog at dailyadventure.io, which goes deeper on the design and the AI choices we made. What we have been writing about on this Story Seeds blog for the last few months are the crossovers: the ways that building a morning-routine product taught us things about the books we donate, and the other way around. If you have read any of those, the short form is that children want the same thing in every medium. A story that is actually about them.
If you have a Yoto, setup takes a couple of minutes at dailyadventure.io. If you run a Somerset primary and would like a Yoto as part of a donation, tell us when you register.
More there: dailyadventure.io