Introducing FoxLeaf: Audiobooks You Can Watch
FoxLeaf turns audiobooks into illustrated scenes, generated on your device as you listen. Learn more at foxleafapp.com.
Today we are introducing FoxLeaf, the first app from TRON Technologies. FoxLeaf turns an audiobook into something you can watch as well as hear. You press play, and as the narrator reads, the app draws the story: the room, the weather, the people, the moment that is happening right now. Nothing was made in advance and nothing was adapted. The pictures come from the words as they arrive.
Here is what that looks like in practice. You open a book, either an MP3 you already own or one of the tens of thousands of public domain titles in Foxy's Library, and choose one of thirteen art styles. Playback starts immediately. Scenes appear alongside the narration and change as the story changes. When a character walks into a lit kitchen at midnight, you see a lit kitchen at midnight. When the story moves to the harbor two chapters later, the harbor is what is on screen. You are still listening to a full, unabridged book in the author's own words. There is simply something to look at that belongs to it.
Three things make FoxLeaf different from anything else we have seen, and each of them was a deliberate engineering decision rather than a feature we added at the end.
The illustrations are generated in real time. There is no waiting for a book to process, no progress bar between you and the story. You press play and the visuals keep pace with the narrator, who never pauses and never waits for the app to catch up. A picture that arrives ninety seconds late is worse than no picture at all, so staying in step became the constraint the whole engine was built around.
The characters stay the same people. This is the hard one. Most AI image tools are very good at making one striking picture and very bad at making the same person twice, which is fine for a single illustration and fatal across an eleven-hour novel. FoxLeaf holds onto who the characters are and where they are as the book progresses, so the person you meet in chapter one is recognizably the same person in chapter thirty. The house stays the house. The ship stays the ship. Without that continuity, illustrations become noise on top of the story instead of support for it.
It all happens on your device. The generative work runs on the phone in your hand, not on our servers, which means the books you listen to never have to leave it. We are not building a record of your reading life, because we did not build the pipe that would carry it. A person's library says more about them than almost anything else on their phone, and the only way to genuinely not have that information is to never receive it. It also means your book keeps playing on a plane, in a basement, and on any day our servers are having a bad time.
The rest is meant to stay out of the way. Switch art styles mid-chapter without losing your place. Cast the audio and visuals to a television so a book becomes something a room can share. Keep everything in a personal library that remembers where you stopped in each title. There is no subscription: pricing starts at $2.99 per book and scales with the length of the file, so a quiet month costs nothing.
FoxLeaf is submitted to the app stores and in review now, for both Android and iOS. We will post here the day it is available. In the meantime we will be writing about the parts worth understanding before you open it, starting with the fox on the icon.