Chapter One

It all started around 2023. I'd been playing with AI, seeing what it could do, where it fell short, what surprised me.

Then one evening we asked the kids to come up with ideas for a story — not a normal one. A chaotic one. Random animals, places they'd never been, items, something from their day, something completely made up. Be as silly as you like. Then we asked AI to write it.

Within seconds, we had a story. Was it perfect? No. Will it ever be? Probably not. But you could see the creativity it sparked, the images it conjured in their minds as we all read it together — plus the fact that they felt they influenced how it was made, felt like their own story just for them. (It was!)

"Can you make me a story please?" Almost every night after that.

Image models were catching up fast, so we started asking for illustrations too. Some were funny, some were off the mark, some were exactly right. We kept making them.

As the stories piled up, a thought kept coming back: it would be nice to save these in an easy way. To come back to a story, pick up where it left off, send the same characters on a new adventure. That idea became Tellah.

My son Oscar suggested lots of names but one was simple and stood out — "Tell a Story." After checking more domain names than I care to admit, we landed on Tellah. We call Matilda "T", and so the T became the icon mark, which felt right and brought it back to the stories we made together (and she asks for the most — she is 7 at the time of writing this).

We still make stories together. We hope you do too.

— Oliver, founder