mission.md

# Mission

## Product Vision

**ReadBookMom** — a parent records a short voice sample, then a bedtime story is narrated in that parent's cloned voice. Story Q&A uses a local audio model for fast spoken answers. The demo runs on local models inside a Gradio app on Hugging Face Spaces.

## Problem

Parents can't always be there at bedtime. Children want to hear *their parent's voice* reading to them. Existing TTS is generic and impersonal, while voice cloning APIs are expensive and require sending private family audio to third parties.

## Demo Loop

```
Parent records 15s of voice → Pick a story → Story starts in parent's voice
                                    ↓
                    Child taps Ask mid-story → Narration pauses
                                    ↓
                  Child asks a question → Hears a fast spoken answer
                                    ↓
              Resume story from the same position (or ask another question)
                                    ↓
                      Story finishes → Show "Pick another story" prompt
```

Latency and natural interruption are part of the demo promise: the story should start quickly, pause cleanly when the child wants to ask something, answer with low delay, then resume without losing the story position. The Q&A answer voice is intentionally generated by the local audio Q&A model rather than the cloned narrator voice. The child may ask multiple questions in a row before resuming. When the last chunk finishes playing, the app returns to the story selection screen.

**Demo time budget:** A 3-minute live walkthrough allows ~2 Q&A rounds (each round ≈ 15s of dead air: pause + ask + wait + answer + resume). Plan the demo script around 1–2 questions placed at natural story moments.

## Hackathon Goal (2 days)

Ship a working Hugging Face Space that demonstrates:
1. **Voice cloning** — parent uploads/records a short audio clip, Qwen3-TTS extracts speaker embedding
2. **Interruptible story narration** — Qwen3-TTS streams sentence-sized chunks in the cloned voice (Supertonic fallback for stock voice)
3. **Voice Q&A during narration** — child taps Ask, narration pauses, LFM2.5-Audio answers from the story context, then speaks the answer directly for lower latency

## Target Demo User

A parent at a laptop who records their voice, picks a short story, and shows their child the result.

## Success Criteria (Hackathon)

| Criteria | Target |
|---|---|
| Voice clone from ≤ 30s audio | 2 of 3 listeners identify the voice in a blind A/B test |
| Story start latency | First streamed audio chunk in ≤ 5s |
| Narration interruption | Ask tap pauses playback in ≤ 500ms and preserves story position |
| Cached story replay | Starts immediately after first generation |
| Q&A answer (spoken, live) | Spoken answer starts in ≤ 8s from question submit (known compromise — a young child may lose attention) |
| Q&A answer (spoken, pre-generated) | Sub-1s for anticipated questions matched from background Q&A cache |
| Story resume latency | Resume from paused position in ≤ 1s when next chunk is cached |
| Works on HF Spaces | Public link, no local setup needed |
| Demo length | 3-minute live walkthrough |
| Privacy posture | Voice and Q&A stay on the Space runtime |

## Scope

**In scope:**
- Upload/record parent voice sample (15–30s)
- Select from 10 pre-loaded short stories (public domain, sourced from Project Gutenberg)
- Play story narrated in cloned voice with interruptible chunked streaming
- Pause narration through an Ask button, preserve the current story chunk, answer, then resume
- Cache generated narration per voice session and story
- Ask a question about the story, receive a grounded 1–2 sentence LFM2.5-Audio answer, and hear it as low-latency generated speech
- Clean, child-friendly UI (Google Stitch-inspired via gr.Server)

**Out of scope:**
- User accounts, auth, database
- Offline mode, progress tracking
- Multiple languages
- Always-listening voice barge-in, echo cancellation, and open-mic interruption
- COPPA compliance (demo only)

## Guardrails (Lite)

| Constraint | Implementation |
|---|---|
| Content grounding | LFM2.5-Audio receives the selected story text plus a strict answer-from-story instruction |
| Voice privacy | All inference local on HF Space GPU — no audio leaves the server |
| Child safety | Pre-curated stories only; no user-uploaded content |

## Latency Strategy

| Bottleneck | Strategy |
|---|---|
| Voice setup | Compute and cache the voice representation immediately after recording. |
| Story narration | Use interruptible chunked streaming: generate the first paragraph chunk, play it immediately, then continue generating queued chunks. |
| Interruption | Add an Ask state that pauses playback, cancels or deprioritizes queued narration generation, and stores the current chunk index. |
| Story replay | Cache full generated narration by voice session and story ID. |
| Q&A context | Send the current story position plus the most relevant story passages to LFM2.5-Audio instead of the full story when possible. |
| Q&A length | Cap answers to 1–2 short child-friendly sentences to reduce spoken-answer latency. |
| Pre-generated Q&A | While each chunk plays, generate 2–3 anticipated Q&A pairs with audio in the background. Match incoming questions against the cache for sub-1s responses; fall back to live generation on miss. |
| Story resume | Resume from the paused chunk after the spoken answer; use cached next chunks when available. |
| Voice question input | Use LFM2.5-Audio directly for audio questions; text questions bypass audio input. |

## Design Review Notes

| Topic | Critique | Upgrade |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy | An external LLM API would weaken the privacy story even if audio stayed local. | Use local LFM2.5-Audio for story Q&A so the demo has one clear privacy narrative. |
| Latency | The cloned narrator voice is valuable for story playback, but forcing every Q&A answer through cloned TTS adds delay to the live interaction loop. | Use LFM2.5-Audio for direct audio-in/audio-out answers, cache voice setup, stream chunked narration, make playback cancellable, and cap Q&A output. |
| Demo clarity | Voice cloning, narration, ASR, and Q&A can feel like too many moving parts. | Present the loop as three simple actions: record, listen, ask. |