Case study
← All workYoluno
A conversational companion for children aged 3–13 where the parent, not the model, defines what exists in the world.
- Client
- Yoluno
- Year
- 2026
- Discipline
- Applied AI · Children's platform
- Live
- www.yoluno.com
Context
A learning and storytelling platform built around a character children talk to. The appeal is an open-ended companion; the risk is the same sentence. The product had to be genuinely conversational for a three-year-old and a thirteen-year-old, while being trustworthy to the person who is neither of them and who makes the purchasing decision.
Constraints
Open-ended conversational AI and small children are a bad default combination, and the standard mitigation is the wrong shape: filtering output treats safety as something applied after the fact to a system that will otherwise go anywhere. The developmental range compounds it — what a three-year-old needs and what a thirteen-year-old needs are barely the same product. And the buyer is the parent, so the safety model has to be explainable in one sentence, not audited.
Architecture
Three services and a clean split at the front: a Kids Mode and a Parent Dashboard, with sign-up gated so a child cannot reach the first without a parent having come through the second. The boundary is curation rather than filtering — the dashboard is where the world is defined and Kids Mode is where it is inhabited, which makes safety a property of what the child can reach rather than a check on what the model says.
01
Curation over filtering.
A filter is a probabilistic guard on an unbounded system. Bounding what the child can reach in the first place is a far stronger guarantee, and — decisively for the buyer — one that can be explained to a parent in a sentence.
What it cost
The parent has to do setup work before the product does anything, which is friction at exactly the moment a new user is deciding whether to continue.
02
Parent sign-up as a hard gate rather than a prompt.
It guarantees there is never a session nobody has authorised, which is the claim the whole product rests on.
What it cost
No frictionless trial, and no way for a child to discover the product on their own.
- Services in production
- 3
- read from deployment
Live on its own domain with a parent-governed world model, two distinct front ends over three production services, and paid subscriptions.
Stack
TypeScript · React · PostgreSQL · Stripe · Real-time messaging