konteen
Visit Sitekonteen is an AI-powered storytelling platform that transforms family memories into illustrated children's books. Through guided conversations, parents and grandparents can share personal stories that are structured into narratives and illustrated as keepsake storybooks for children.
Origin
My parents left Korea together in search of a better future. Today I watch my father try to share those stories with his grandchildren, reaching for English words that never quite hold what he means. The things that shaped his life live in a language they cannot speak.
My mother passed away before they were born, so the stories that shaped her life exist only in memory now — stories they will never hear in her own voice.
Moments like these made something clear to me: the stories that define our families are often the ones most easily lost. Language, distance, and time quietly erase them. konteen began as an attempt to preserve those stories — and to give them a form that children could return to again and again.
How might we turn the act of preserving family stories into something as natural and warm as the stories themselves?
The Approach
We reframed the product around warmth and ritual rather than efficiency. Recording a story should feel like having a conversation, not completing a form — with gentle prompts that help surface memories people often forget they have.
AI Pipeline
An empathetic conversation doesn’t produce a structured story on its own. The pipeline bridges that gap — three distinct AI personas, each tuned to its role: empathetic listening to draw out the story, structured extraction to lock down the facts, and constrained creativity to generate the narrative and illustrations.
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The storyteller can correct the AI mid-conversation — extraction handles these revisions without reprocessing the full transcript
Creative output is constrained by prompt rules — imaginative enough for a children’s story, structured enough to illustrate
Characters are generated first, then referenced in every subsequent scene — maintaining visual consistency across the full storybook
Illustration System
To ensure visual consistency and emotional tone across stories, we designed a curated illustration system rather than allowing unrestricted generation styles. Each style was chosen for its readability, warmth, and ability to carry the weight of family memories.
Building the System
Konteen required designing a full pipeline that connects conversation capture, narrative generation, and visual storytelling — coordinating UX design with AI capabilities, narrative constraints, and publishing requirements.
“I helped a stranger once, in a tea house in Seoul. I didn't know it then, but that moment changed everything.”
Long ago, in the year 1979, the big city of Seoul in South Korea was a place full of energy and noise. A young man named Paul worked hard every day at Daewoo Motors, never imagining that a single act of kindness would change his life forever…
Storytelling at a Glance
Family stories are quiet. Social platforms are loud. The challenge was designing content that could hold the emotional weight of the product in a format built for speed — translating warmth and ritual into visuals that resonate in seconds.
The best products disappear into rituals.
The hardest design challenge wasn't the interface — it was earning trust in deeply personal moments. Sometimes the most powerful thing a product can do is make space.