Why yarn?

When you have kids, it’s actually shocking to discover how much distances – even small ones – matter. When you try to bridge those gaps, you find that FaceTime and Zoom are actually terrible with young children.

As an international family, we thought it was extraordinary that no communication tool yet exists that truly values and honours how young children engage and build relationships.

With yarn, don’t expect to find silly filters and mindless games that hack kids’ dopamine reward cycles. Instead, we believe that imagination and storytelling sit at the natural centre of the communication experience for young kids.

Yarn uses AI to help kids as young as 4 build and share open-ended storyworlds with friends and family. Kids can say anything they like to yarn, or even take a photo, and in an unfolding conversation with the app, see their ideas brought to life as an illustrated audio story. A unicorn who makes friends with a dragon? A robot lost in the jungle? Or just a little girl who loves to go on adventures with her grandma?

These stories, along with children’s incredible voice recordings, can then be shared with loved ones; the adults can make stories in return, weaving a shared narrative tapestry. With our real-time moderation and parent controls, busy caregivers don’t need to play gatekeeper and facilitator – instead, their kids can take the driving seat, creatively and practically.

Come join our community of early users, and take yarn for a spin!

FAQs

  • See our ‘How To’ page here.

  • Yarn is currently in open beta and remains in development – which means we’re still figuring out how to make the product really shine. We currently have a web app that works in the browser, but are building a native app (and more).

    We’d love your thoughts about what’s working and what isn’t, so feel free to write to us at hello@yarn.family.

  • From our experience, children aged 4 and above get the most out of yarn, and can use it autonomously. Younger children can also enjoy yarn with the help of a caregiver.

  • Yarn uses AI to spin stories. When a child talks to yarn, what they say is incorporated into highly tailored instructions that we provide to a number of language and image models. In turn, these models generate parts of the story and accompanying pictures.

    Your child’s name is never shared with these models, nor is any information we hold about you. The models only receive a transcription of what your child said, and nothing else.

  • There are multiple safeguards to ensure that children are NOT at risk of being served content on yarn that is inappropriate, sexual, violent or distressing. The models we use have multiple in-built blocks that prevent such content being generated, and we've added our own real-time moderation. This means the text, images and voice recordings don't contain inappropriate material.

    Our extensive testing gives us confidence that yarn is safe for kids to use on their own. However, if anything gives you cause for concern, you can always report it in the app or send us an email at hello@yarn.family

  • Nothing, besides keeping it private and secure.

    We will never sell your personal data or use it to serve ads. The information and inputs associated with your account are used to create your stories and tailor your experience – nothing else, ever.

    You can read more in our privacy policy.

  • At the moment we aren’t charging for yarn because we're still playtesting, and we want as many people as possible to enjoy it. In the future, we will likely move towards an affordable subscription service. But we expect that part of yarn will always be available for free.

Have ideas or feedback for us? Drop us a line at hello@yarn.family