David Vinkenroye
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Babytalk

An iOS app that tells stories and sings songs to young children in a parent's voice.

Built by in Geneva.

Azure illustration of a small astronaut floating beside a crescent moon with sound waves drifting like a lullaby

The story

With Babytalk, a parent's voice can tell the bedtime story even when the parent is in another room or in a meeting. It plays stories, songs and short lessons that fit the child's age, narrated in the parent's own cloned voice or a preset voice.

Claude writes the story and lesson scripts on the server. ElevenLabs does the narration, the voice cloning, the songs and the speech-to-text search. The songs are really sung, and I love that. A small API sits in between, so no key is stored on the device.

The app has a story library, songs in several languages, lesson topics made on demand, voice search, read-along sentence by sentence and a hands-free talk mode that is safe for children.

What was built

  • Narration in a parent's cloned voice or a preset voice
  • Scripts written by Claude; songs sung through ElevenLabs Music
  • Voice search and sentence-level read-along
  • A hands-free, child-safe talk mode
  • An API proxy, so no key ships in the app

Stack

  • Swift 6
  • SwiftUI
  • SwiftData
  • StoreKit 2
  • XcodeGen
  • Claude API
  • ElevenLabs
  • TypeScript
  • Vercel

Themes

  • AI agents

    I wanted a personal AI assistant that can do everything online for me, and it can even make phone calls. I build them with whichever models and tools fit best: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, open models and plenty of plain code.

  • Built for Switzerland

    Switzerland has four official languages, so my sites come in up to four of them. Some products connect to Swiss shops and trains, and hosting is in Switzerland or the EU by default.

  • For the family

    Some of what I build is for home. Babytalk tells bedtime stories in a parent's voice, and I built a birth announcement site to share the news in one place. I also built an interactive family recipe website so we can cook from our own recipes.

  • NeonduckA personal AI assistant that does everything online for you and can even make calls.
  • Romandy CTOThe bilingual platform behind a peer network of senior tech leaders in Romandy.
  • EmineonA consulting and talent company with an English and French site and a daily blog.