A voice like story time
Not flat narration — an expressive storyteller who slows for the sad parts and whispers when the fox is near.
Learn French together
Turn any French picture book into a storyteller.
Photograph the pages of a children's book and Candle Fable reads them aloud — warm, expressive French, page by page. Learn the language with your kid, one story at a time.
How it works
Three pages to story time
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Photographier
Photograph the book
Snap each page with your phone, cover to back. The photos are the book — no typing, no searching a catalog.
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Lire
We lift the words
The French text is read out of your photos and typeset page by page, ready for a quick check before the telling.
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Écouter
Listen together
An expressive storyteller reads each page aloud. Press play, sit close, and turn the pages side by side.
Made for story time
The small things that make it warm
Hands free at bedtime
Pages turn themselves, with a gentle pause to look at the pictures. Play and pause from your headphones or the lock screen.
A shelf of your own
Every book you capture joins your library — covers, pages, and voices — ready for one more reading, tonight or next year.
Why this exists
I don’t speak French. We’re learning anyway.
I’m raising my daughter to speak French. She’s three. I don’t speak it myself — so we’re learning together, the way she learns everything: by hearing the same stories again, and again, and again.
We find French picture books second-hand on Vinted — a few euros each, soft from some other child’s hands. The hard part was always the reading. I can’t do the voices, and my accent turns the magic off.
So I built something to do the reading for us. We photograph a book, it reads each page aloud in warm French, and we listen side by side — pointing at the pictures, repeating the lines we love. The repetition is the point. It’s how she’s learning. It’s how I’m learning too.
Honest answers
Your photos, and where they go
This is a personal project, so here’s the plain truth about what happens to what you upload.
What happens to the photos I take?
They’re uploaded and stored on DigitalOcean Spaces (servers in London) so your book stays in your library. They’re used for one thing: reading the French text off the page and showing the book back to you. We don’t sell them, and we don’t use them to train anything of our own.
Who reads the text out of my photos?
Each page photo is sent to Anthropic’s Claude, which transcribes the French text from the image. That’s the only reason a photo leaves our storage — to turn the picture of a page into the words on it.
How is the audio made?
The French text from your photos is sent to ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech, which generates the spoken audio in a warm storyteller voice. The resulting MP3 is saved alongside your book so it’s ready to play any night.
Is my child’s data involved?
No. The only account is yours — an email address and the books you add. We don’t collect anything about your child, and the photos are of book pages, not of them.
Which books work best?
Printed French children’s picture books — the kind you find second-hand for a euro or two. Clear, well-lit photos of pages with real text read best; tiny captions and very stylised lettering are harder.
Can I delete everything?
Yes. Delete a book and its pages, photos, and audio go with it. Close your account and the same is true of all of them. Read the full privacy note.
Bonne nuit
Tonight’s story is waiting.
Pick a book from the shelf, photograph it once, and it will read to you both for years.
Start your bookshelf