Guide for parents
Personalised bedtime stories, starring your child
Updated · by the Moonfox team
A personalised bedtime story is written for one particular child: they are the hero, and the story uses their name, their age, the things they love and the friends they care about. Moonfox is an iPhone app that makes one every night, written, painted and read aloud, and keeps the same hero and friends from one night to the next.
What makes a story feel personal
Swapping a name into a template isn't enough, and children notice. When we read the critical reviews parents leave for AI story apps, the complaints were about exactly that: stories that are “all the same” apart from the location and the animal, and children drawn or named wrong. A story feels like theirs when:
- The hero looks like them. Same face, same hair, same pyjamas, in every picture and every night.
- The world remembers. The same friends come back, and last night's adventure leads into tonight's.
- It fits their age. A three-year-old needs simpler words and a gentler adventure than a nine-year-old.
- It knows a little about today. A brave trip to the dentist, a new sibling, a first day at school.
- They get a say. Choosing which way the story goes makes it theirs in a way a name never can.
How Moonfox personalises each story
The hero, drawn without a photo
A parent describes the hero with simple choices: hair, skin tone, eye colour, pyjama colour, and if you like glasses, freckles, hearing aids or a wheelchair, plus a favourite cuddly toy. Lumi, the fox who guides set-up, paints a storybook portrait from those choices; you can ask for a repaint. That portrait becomes the reference for every scene, so the hero stays recognisably the same. Moonfox never asks for a photo of your child.
Friends who come back
Your child picks one to three friends from a roster of 24, such as Lumi the fox, Milo the small blue dragon, Pip the owl or Tuck, a bunny plush come alive. Each has one canonical portrait, so a friend looks the same every night. A favourite real toy, a pet or a crayon drawing can also become a friend: you photograph it, a safety check refuses any photo with a person in it, and Moonfox redraws it as an illustration. The photo itself isn't kept.
Age, length and tone
Stories are written for one of three age bands, 3–5, 6–8 or 9–12, each with its own vocabulary, tension ceiling and length. You choose 5, 10 or 15 minutes, and gentle or more adventurous.
A world that grows
Each season is a moon cycle of seven stops on a map. One new stop opens each night and every visited stop replays forever. There are no streaks and nothing is lost if you skip a night.
Something from today
Add one sentence, like “was brave at the dentist”, and tonight's story echoes it gently. The sentence passes a safety check first and is dropped, never echoed, if the check flags it.
Their language
Stories are written and narrated in English, Spanish, German, French or Brazilian Portuguese, and each child can have their own.
Choices, out loud
At a turn in the path the story asks which way to go, with two options. Your child answers out loud, recognised by Apple's speech recognition on the iPhone only, or taps. The two paths join again, so every choice leads to the same calm goodnight.
Personal, but private
Personalising a story doesn't need to mean giving it your child's details. In Moonfox the first name is optional, and the AI models that write the story, check it and draw the pictures never see it: Moonfox's server replaces the name with a placeholder before anything reaches them. Only the narration says the name. Private mode leaves it out entirely, and the narrator says “little dreamer” instead. Moonfox has no account, no ads and no third-party analytics. The details are in the privacy policy and in how Moonfox keeps AI stories safe.
Personalised stories with Moonfox, in short
| What you choose | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Hero look and cuddly toy | The painted hero in every picture |
| First name (optional) | Said in the narration and the goodnight; never sent to the writing or drawing models |
| Age band: 3–5, 6–8, 9–12 | Words, tension and length |
| Interests and 1–3 friends | Where the stories go and who comes along |
| Length: 5, 10 or 15 minutes | How long tonight's story is |
| Story language | English, Spanish, German, French or Brazilian Portuguese |
| One sentence from today (optional) | A gentle echo in tonight's story |
Moonfox is free to download and each child's first night is free; Moonfox Premium adds up to 20 new adventures a month. It runs on iPhone with iOS 26.5 or later and is coming soon to the App Store.