How a Fablebee story is made
From a first name to a finished, narrated audio story — usually in a few minutes. Here is every step, including the parts most services do not describe.
Three stories free. No card needed. After that, from £3.99 — what it costs.
- 1
You say who it is for
A first name or a nickname, and roughly how old they are — an age band, never a date of birth, and never a photograph. Pets can be in the story too. You save the people in your family once and reuse them, so the second story takes a moment rather than starting again.
This is the smallest amount of information that still produces a story a child recognises as theirs, which is deliberate. The privacy notice sets out exactly what is kept and for how long.
- 2
You choose what it is about
Pick a theme — kindness, dinosaurs, starting school, a first sleepover — or describe your own idea in your own words. Then choose how it should sound: cosy and sleepy, playful and silly, brave and proud, and so on. The tone changes the writing, not just the reading.
- 3
You choose a length and a narrator
Three, five, ten, fifteen or twenty-five minutes. Every length costs the same on every plan — a twenty-five minute story counts exactly as one story, the same as a three minute one.
Then pick who reads it. There are six narrators, five British and one Irish, and you can hear all six before you choose.
- 4
We write it, check it and read it aloud
These are AI-generated audio stories. The words are written by a language model from what you told us, and the reading is a synthetic voice — not a person in a studio. We say that plainly because it is true and because the law requires it, and because a parent should never be in any doubt about what their child is listening to.
Before a story reaches you it is checked against what we will not produce. That check is honest about its own limits: it runs on the same model that wrote the story, so it is a safety net rather than a second opinion. How we use AI sets out what is generated, what is checked, and what the model is told.
The six narrator voices are built from public-domain recordings read by volunteers for LibriVox. Nothing is trained on anybody: the model is given a short reference clip at the moment it speaks.
- 5
You listen together
A few minutes later it is in your library, with its own cover, ready to play. You can download the MP3 and take it with you — into the car, onto a plane, anywhere without a signal. It works with a Yoto player the way any MP3 does.
Being straight about one thing: listening runs with your plan. Stories made from a pack play for twelve months from the day they were made. This is a service, not a shelf of books you own — the pricing page spells out exactly what happens if you cancel.
Questions parents actually ask
Is my child's name sent anywhere?
It goes to the service that writes and reads the story, and nowhere else. It is never used to advertise to you, never sold, and never shown to another family — there is no gallery and no way for anyone outside your household to hear your stories. What we do about safety goes through this properly.
Does my child need an account?
No. Fablebee is for you to use and for them to listen to. Children never sign in and we never ask them for anything.
How long does a story take to make?
Usually a few minutes. A twenty-five minute story takes longer than a three minute one, because it is genuinely twenty-five minutes of speech. You do not have to wait on the page.
What if a story comes out wrong?
Tell us and we will sort it out. If a story does not finish, its credit normally comes back to your account automatically and you can simply make another. Support is a real person, answering within two UK working days.
Can I hear one before I pay?
You get three stories free, with no card. That is deliberately not a sample of somebody else's child — it is three real stories about yours.