A newer version of the Gradio SDK is available: 6.20.0
title: Tonight's Tale
emoji: 🌙
colorFrom: indigo
colorTo: pink
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 5.49.1
app_file: app.py
pinned: false
license: apache-2.0
models:
- Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B
- Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo
- hexgrad/Kokoro-82M
tags:
- build-small-hackathon
short_description: Turn your child's day into an illustrated bedtime story
🌙 Tonight's Tale — Build Small Hackathon (Backyard AI track)
The real problem (mine, every single night): my kid had a rough moment today — wouldn't share toys, quarreled with a friend. Lecturing a 4-year-old at bedtime doesn't work. But a story about a little rabbit facing the same dilemma? That works.
What it does: describe what happened in your child's day. The app weaves it into an illustrated, narrated fairy tale starring your child's favorite recurring characters — with choice points the child decides. A "wrong" turn leads to a gentle, recoverable setback ending; then you rewind together: "what if we'd chosen differently?" — and replay the other branch to a warm ending. The moral is shown only to the parent; the story itself never preaches.
Small models, big adventure (≈10B total, ≤ 32B ✓)
| Job | Model | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Story writing (zh/en/de/fr, branching, JSON) | Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B | 4B |
| Watercolor illustrations | Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo | 6B |
| Bedtime narration | hexgrad/Kokoro-82M | 0.08B |
Living with small-model limitations is the engineering core here, hardened on a 4GB-VRAM laptop before this Space existed: schema-in-prompt JSON generation with balanced-brace extraction, tolerant output normalization, business-invariant validation with corrective retries, and "soft issues" that retry once then accept. Character visual consistency uses fixed English appearance descriptions + one seed per story — no adapters needed.
Try it (10 seconds)
The cast is pre-filled. Just type what happened today — e.g. "Didn't want to share toys at kindergarten and quarreled with a best friend" — and press Weave tonight's story. Make a choice when the story pauses. If you land on the rainy ending, go back and try the other path. 🌧️→🌙
Run locally without any GPU: STORY_MOCK=1 python app.py (mock story/images/audio, full UI flow).