Storytime Sam

What is Storytime Sam app?

Generative Artificial Intelligence is a big thing now, and its presence in educational apps is only likely to grow. Storytime Sam uses GPT-3 technology (the underpinning of the famous ChatGPT chatbot and Microsoft Bing's Sydney) to help generate brand-new stories tailored to your child.

Users of Storytime Sam create a simple character by inputting a name, pronouns, and description in the app and then asking the app to tell them a story, including other details or themes. This part can work within the app by typing in the prompt, but it can also link with iOS's own AI-powered voice assistant, Siri. Used this way, you or your child can ask the app to write a story by voice alone.

The results are short and child-friendly. They contain many features we would expect of a kid's story. The language and sentence structure are simple. The stories don't feature adult themes and often lead towards a lesson or moral for the reader.

The app shows each story as a chat thread, and users can save the ones they like the most to an in-app library. Whether the stories are equal to human-crafted ones, we'll leave you to decide, as the app is free to download, and you can create ten per day at no extra cost.

What we love about Storytime Sam app.

New technology and its applications are fascinating. Artificial intelligence is shaping up to be the next significant shift in how we use tech in leisure, industry, and education, so it is intriguing to see this early step in using it with kids.

The unprecedented growth in people signing up to use AI-powered chatbots shows that adults are interested in it, and Storytime Sam is an accessible way for adults and kids to take a look.

As well as giving kids a chance to be impressed by generative AI, the application of it in Storytime Sam will give today's kids an additional boost of interest in reading.

We know from other reading apps that story personalisation can be a motivating factor, but until now, this usually meant switching a few names and nouns around. With Storytime Sam, the app will construct a whole new story.

What age is it appropriate for?

The app's age rating is 12+, which is appropriate considering the cutting-edge yet occasionally unpredictable underlying technology. The stories are for a much younger age than 12, making this an app best suited to shared use between parents and children.

Is Storytime Sam app easy to use?

The app uses a standard style of interface for apps used by adults but less so for kids. Young kids, in particular, would likely find the app a bit more challenging to use, but their parents should have no trouble. This is in line with the age recommendations noted earlier in this review.

How will students benefit?

Kids are sure to have heard of the amazing chatbots that have surged in popularity but they are not for kids. Storytime Sam will let these kids feel part of the early days of mainstream AI implementation.

For kids who don't have many books or who need extra motivation to read, the endless variations and customisation of those the app can make in an instant could be the key to reading more. For many kids, feeling like they are reading something they have created could be the key to getting them to engage with the written word.

How will parents benefit?

The app's look and feel is not especially child-focused so it may be beneficial for parents to use it with their kids. Coming up with ideas for stories and seeing how the app responds will be a fun activity and an excellent way to get kids to focus on reading the results.

The creative component of creating the tales in Storytime Sam adds a unique motivation to get kids reading.

How will teachers benefit?

Storytime Sam could underpin a variation on daily storytelling for classroom teachers. Each day, one of the kids could choose the prompts to generate a story they read aloud to the rest of the class or the teacher reads. The short story lengths make this an easy activity to fit into the day.

It could also be a good way for teachers to generate text for comprehension or other literacy-based activities. It is guaranteed that kids won't have encountered the story before!

What can Storytime Sam app improve on?

The app's look and feel are very business-like, which, while clear, are not especially inviting to young users who, due to the simplicity and style of the stories, are the app's primary audience.

The user interface could also use a few tweaks to match user expectations. For example, where you enter your name, pronouns, and description, there is a button below. This resets what you have entered and is clearly labelled as such but this is usually where an enter button goes.

There is no need to press enter on this screen because the app just uses what is input, but long-ingrained convention frequently led us to tap the button to confirm the details, which irritatingly cleared what we'd just typed.

How much does Storytime Sam app cost?

Storytime Sam is free to download. Users get ten free coins daily, and generating stories and answering questions costs one of these coins. If you want more, these are available through an in-app purchases.

The low cost is fair as access to the underlying AI technology is not free to the publisher of this app. To make it sustainable and, hopefully, in a position to evolve, it needs to generate revenue. Of course, you can stick to just the ten coins per day, which for many will be enough.

Is Storytime Sam app safe to use?

Generative artificial intelligence, such as that underlying this app, can produce wildly different results from what its creators and users expect. Slight differences in the prompt can create completely different outputs.

The app clearly uses filtering and safety features to prevent the prompts from resulting in age-inappropriate content.

During this review of Storytime Sam, we tried to see if we could push the app into outputting something inappropriate for children and failed. The stories would acknowledge a violent component in the prompts but unfailingly turned it back into the main character choosing to do the right thing or making a moral choice.

The current use of GPT-3 based AI for chatbots has shown that we cannot anticipate it will always respond as expected, so we have to accept that in an app with an infinite number of inputs and outputs, a less acceptable response could appear. 

Parents of young children should use the app alongside them. There are no advertisements in the app.

Anybody using a generative AI should be aware that the technology continues to learn while being used. Anything entered will contribute to this, so users should think about what they input, especially if it contains any identifying information.

Overall rating of the app.

Storytime Sam is an interesting early step into using generative artificial intelligence to support kids as they learn. It is a great way for kids who've heard about the advances in AI to try it out in a child-friendly app.

Many people use AI-based chatbots through curiosity and interest in the impressive results rather than for practical purposes. At the moment, it is something of an intriguing gimmick. This is true of Storytime Sam.

Its stories are interesting because they come from the user. They are readable and coherent but you'd probably not be so impressed if you bought a book filled with them. However, gimmicks are exciting and, at least for the present, they will get kids using the app, and the only way they'll find out what their prompts have created is to read the output. If this app gets your kids reading more, we will class that as a win!

As you can download the app for free and generate a few stories per day without cost, it is risk-free and easy to see if you can harness AI to get your kids to read a bit more. Download Storytime Sam and give it a try.