Instead of making up whimsical stories in your head, Gemini wants to help you bring your ideas to life in the form of illustrated storybooks.
Up until now, you could share ideas with Gemini and tell it to whip up a simple story with it. Narrowing down prompts and specifying details could yield more personalized results. Now, Google is further enhancing the storybook experience, allowing for even more personalization, read-aloud narration, and even custom art to go along with your stories.
Concrete hints about the feature first started emerging last month, and the wait now seems to be over. Initially believed to be hidden behind a gem, you don’t really need to go into Gemini’s dedicated gem manager section to access the feature. Instead, creating a ‘storybook’ is as simple as navigating to the gemini app and typing away your imaginative prompt in the text box.
“Simply describe any story you can imagine, and Gemini generates a unique 10-page book with custom art and audio,” wrote the tech giant in a blog post announcing the feature. To further personalize the storybook and its illustrations, users are free to point out specific details and share photos and files for the AI tool to draw inspiration from.
Never run out of bedtime stories
In my experience using the feature, Gemini is normally able to generate a complete storybook in roughly a minute, complete with a cover page and ten distinct pages of content. Although Google didn’t explicitly mention it, it is likely that it’s using Veo 2 to power the illustrations, with Google’s text-to-speech model taking over the load of narration.
Users can generate storybooks in multiple languages and styles, including pixel art, comics, claymation, crochet, and even coloring book styles.
The artistic possibilities are truly endless with this one, especially since you have the freedom to share your own photos. Some storybook examples and usecases shared by the tech giant include:
- Understanding complex topics: Create a story that explains the solar system to my 5 year old.
- Teaching lessons in an interactive manner: Teach a 7-year-old boy about the importance of being kind to his little brother. My son loves elephants so let’s make the main character an elephant.
- Bring your own personal artwork to life: Upload an image of a kid’s drawing and modify this example prompt for your use case: “This is my kid’s drawing. He’s 7 years old. Write a creative storybook that brings his drawing to life.”
- Turn your own memories into engaging stories: Upload photos from your family trip to Paris and create a personalized adventure.
The functionality is rolling out now on both desktop and mobile. As of writing, the feature has only been rolled out to me on the web.
