Dootle

Inspiration

Our team grew up around adventure, creativity, and curiosity. Just as the textbooks we studied contributed to our learning, the novels that we read kept us entertained and shaped who we are.

With technology now being introduced to younger ages, and advancements in AI being made at a rapid pace, we wanted to bring our current studies and passions to those of the past. Through Dootle, we hope to provide a tech-forward avenue to greater empower children and parents to channel their creativity and storytelling abilities.

What it does

Dootle is an interactive children’s storybook maker. Kids (or kids-at-heart) draw a character in the browser, describe the character and a theme, and Dootle generates a 16‑page picture book with consistent illustrations and optional narration.

Some of our Features:

Drawing canvas and tools
Audio narration
User account and authentication
Storybook bookshelving and downloading

How we built it

Our frontend was built using React, Tailwind CSS, and NextJS.

Our backend was built on Flask and MongoDB, with calls to Gemini, Claude, and ElevenLabs models through OpenRouter.

To optimize our process, we used a combination of latency budgeting, prompt engineering, exponential backoff, and parallel computing.

Challenges we ran into

Something incredibly important to us was the child's ability to see an EXACT copy of their character in our story. It took some clever prompt engineering, extraction, and structuring to achieve this.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

While our team is experienced, we still leveraged this opportunity to learn more about the software development process, and working with generative models. We really love some of the stories our brains created at 2am, and we'd love to share them with you.

Additionally, one of our teammates managed to finish two Popeyes chicken sandwiches in one sitting.

What's next for Dootle

There are so many paths to build on this project. But first, we want to bring a demo to IOS and collect user feedback to see what features parents and children most desire, and work on those next.