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For the last 7 years, I have been telling my daughter a story every night before bed. Every night the same bunch of characters would get into some kind of trouble or funny situation and work their way out of it.

The leader is Giocondo (pronounced "Jocondo"), a funny, whiny, lazy little mouse, and his best friend Ernesto ("Earnest-o"), a same-age, friendly, funny, naive pigeon.

Over time, the set of characters grew wider, adding a girl - another mouse - named "Hermione", who slowly led me to turn the whole run of stories into a Harry Potter fan fiction, for lack of better ideas. So for the last couple of years, they have been studying at Hogwarts, surrounded by Dumbledore, Hagrid, and the works. I hope nobody will sue me.

In any case, I am REALLY running out of ideas, so I got the idea of turning to GPT for new ones.

This rapidly escalated, and a fun project came to my mind: an automatic storyteller. I know that those nighttime stories are not about the story but about me and her, the connection, and the relationship, and us having fun together.

But still, I think it's a funny thing to try, and an opportunity to dip my toes into AI territory.

THE PLAN

This is the rundown of the features I want:

  1. Keep the core set of characters, each with their own personality and quirks.
  2. Include a wide variety of situations and locations, and possibly invent new characters:
    1. Avoid anything evil or dark. My daughter likes funny, lighthearted stories. It's okay if there's somebody threatening, just not too much. No scares before bed.
    2. Keep the story in Hogwarts and similar settings.
    3. Include unicorns. The "Queen of Unicorns" is an important character.
  3. Make it a "choose your own adventure" story: write a paragraph or so, prompt us whether we want the situation to evolve one way or another, and let us choose and move from there.
  4. Use as much dialogue as possible.

Those are the core features. Next, I'd like it to:

  1. Be a spoken thing. I'd like for it to tell the stories. My daughter doesn't like to read too much, especially if she's tired.
  2. Maybe then listen for the feedback? Not having her type her choice.
  3. Include an image depicting the current situation.

That's about it. Next, I'll try to run it on Alexa or similar devices for ease of use.

Let's go. This is going to be a "work in progress" / "build in public" thing. So excuse the mess.