About — the story of Kiddo Stories

I’m Mattia. I have two daughters, and this is the story of why we built an app that doesn’t read for you.

How it started

The older one is four and a half. The little one is four months old. In our house, bedtime is a non-negotiable ritual — that half hour before lights out is probably the only moment of the day when I’m not thinking about anything else.

For the first year with the older one, though, that half hour was also a bit on autopilot. I’d open the book, read the story, close the book, give her a kiss. She’d look at the pictures, listen, occasionally point at something. I thought I was a dad who read a lot — and in a way, I was.

What I didn’t know is that there’s a huge difference between reading to a child and reading with a child. The discovery came by accident, while reading American pediatric guidelines, where the same word kept coming back: Dialogic Reading. A technique documented since 1988 (Whitehurst et al., Stony Brook University), explicitly recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, with meta-analyses on thousands of children showing measurable effects on vocabulary, narrative comprehension, empathy.

And yet almost unknown outside speech-therapy and pedagogy circles.

I spent a couple of months reading papers and trying the techniques with my daughter. Results: beautiful and immediate. The 10-minute story turned into 18 minutes of real conversation. She stopped being a spectator and became a co-narrator. She started using new words during the day. And — this is the part meta-analyses don’t measure — that half hour had become ours in a different way than before.

So I asked myself: why does something that works so well, and is free, reach so few of us?

What Kiddo Stories is — and what it’s NOT

That’s where Kiddo Stories was born. But the important decision came right after, and it was about what I didn’t want to build.

The “children’s stories app” market has filled up over the past two years with products that use AI to replace the parent. The AI invents the story, the AI tells it with a synthetic voice, the child watches the screen alone. Explicit or implicit promise: “free up 10 minutes, we’ve got this”.

That’s not the product I wanted for my daughters, and not the product we wanted to build.

Kiddo Stories does the opposite. You are always the narrator. The app gives you a story (customizable for your child) and quietly suggests, at the right moment, the three or four open-ended questions that turn reading into dialogue. The questions are built on the PEER and CROWD frameworks of academic Dialogic Reading.

We don’t read for you. We don’t talk to your child. We don’t entertain them. We are a silent prompter that helps you become the best narrator you already are.

Our wedge, in plain words: we’re not a parent replacement, we’re the tool for the parent.

What we want to change

One thing I’ve learned as a father is that tech shortcuts with kids almost always make us pay later. A generation of children raised with tablet-babysitters is already a conversation happening in pediatric neuropsychiatry wards.

We believe there’s room, in how AI enters homes with children, for another path — one where AI saves parents preparation time, not presence time. It’s a subtle but decisive difference. Setting the table for a well-made story takes work: picking the right book, remembering the questions, knowing what works at which age. All of that the app can do for you. But then, at the table, you have to be there.

The values (short manifesto)

  • The parent is the narrator. Always. Never a synthetic voice replacing yours.
  • Scientific evidence as our yardstick. Every question prompt is anchored to peer-reviewed literature on Dialogic Reading. We don’t invent methodologies.
  • Radical privacy. Your child’s data is not the product. No ads, no profiling of minors, privacy-by-design and explicit attention to GDPR rules for children.
  • No ads, no dark patterns. One transparent family subscription. That’s it.
  • Multilingual from day one. Italian, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese — because dialogic reading works best in the mother tongue, and because many families raise bilingual children.

When it ships

We’re launching in spring 2026 on iOS. Android right after. Anyone who signs up on the waitlist on the home page gets one month free at launch and early access to TestFlight in the weeks before.

Email me, really

I’m building this because it’s needed in my own home first. Every email to hello@kiddostories.it reaches me directly and I reply. If you have an idea, a doubt, a critique, a bedtime story to tell me — write. That’s how the product gets better.

Thanks for being here.

— Mattia Triboulet, founder of Kiddo Stories