Story player
Calliope
The one that is not a radio. Calliope reads stories to a child, in the voice of someone who loves them.
The controls
Three buttons. No dial, no screen, no microphone.
One large domed button in the centre, flanked by two smaller ones. Left is again. Centre is play. Right is another.
The vocabulary is the child's own. A three-year-old at bedtime says "again" and "another one", so mapping the controls to those words means nothing has to be taught.
Left · small
Again
The story starts over.
Centre · large domed
Play
Starts, and stops.
Right · small
Another
The next story.
The buttons
Cast silicone, soft under a small hand.
A gentle amber glow rises from inside the domes when a story is playing and fades when it stops. The glow reads the room and dims itself: bright enough to find in a lit bedroom, barely there at two in the morning.
It is the colour of a candle, never of a screen.
Where the stories live
Everything plays from the device itself.
No stream, no buffering, no "sorry, I'm having trouble connecting" at bedtime. Stories arrive overnight while the house sleeps, and if a button is pressed the download stops instantly and the child gets their story.
A three-year-old does not care that a server is having an incident.
The voice
Calliope plays recordings of a real person.
A grandparent, a parent, an aunt. We provide a guided recording process that takes about ninety minutes across three sittings.
From that we can produce both the stories they actually read and, where a family wants it, longer works narrated in their voice. The distinction is always explicit and always visible to the family: what was truly read, and what was generated.
A child too young to remember someone is read to by them anyway. That is the product, said once.
Who it is for
A grandparent who lives three states away. A parent who travels. A family that has just realised a voice is finite.
It lives on a low shelf in a child's room, at a height they can reach. It is heavy enough not to tip and solid enough to be dropped.
At a glance
- Dimensions
- 170 × 117 × 102 mm
- Weight
- approx. 1.1 kg
- Driver
- 2.5″ full-range, sealed
- Voice range
- voice down to 105 Hz
- Battery
- USB powered - approx. nine days of bedtime use per charge if req’d
- Controls
- Three cast silicone buttons, amber glow that reads the room
- Microphone
- None
- Network
- Wi-Fi for overnight story updates delivery · plays entirely from the device
- Finish
- Quartersawn ash, oak or walnut · matte hand-oiled
- Price
- £540
- Availability
- Waitlist — first run of 50
Availability