Story Theatre: a story performed, not read
Every talking speaker can read you a story. One voice, start to finish, and the room never changes. We wanted the other thing — a cast, a weather bed underneath, a door that actually creaks, and the lights going deep blue when the storm arrives.
Story Theatre shipped this week. You ask for a story — a topic, roughly how long, who it is for — and instead of reading one, RoboFoxy stages it.
A cast, not a narrator
Each character is cast to its own voice and keeps it from the first scene to the last: the narrator, the old sailor, the child, the thing in the cellar. Dialogue stops being quoted at you and starts being spoken by someone.
Sound that sits under the words
A weather bed — rain, wind, sea, fire — runs beneath the whole play, low enough that it never fights the voices. Effects are placed on the line that needs them rather than sprinkled through: the knock lands on the knock, the footsteps cross while someone is crossing.
The room changes with the scene
This is the part people do not expect. If you have Philips Hue bulbs, the lights move with the story: warm yellow for a sunny field, washed-out white for overcast, deep blue at low brightness for the storm, orange for firelight, dim purple for night.
Thunder gets real lightning. Not the gentle pulse a smart bulb does on its own — full white, then near-black, three times with uneven gaps so it does not read as a machine blinking, and then the scene colour comes back underneath.
We can do this because the play is rendered as one piece of audio before any of it plays, so the exact moment each scene begins is known ahead of time. A lighting cue that is a second late is worse than no lighting cue at all.
Your lights, your call
The first version drove every bulb on the bridge, which meant starting a story took over the whole house. Now you pick the room — or you pick none, which is how it arrives. If you never choose a room, the lights are not touched at all, and nothing is “restored” afterwards either.
A story can also be stopped part-way through by touching the robot. Saying “stop” cannot work and never will: while the speaker is playing, the microphone is closed, so the robot genuinely cannot hear you. A touch is the only control a listener can actually reach mid-story.
Where it runs
Story Theatre is part of the AI plan, and one month of AI comes with every RoboFoxy. Scene lighting needs Hue bulbs and a bridge; the voices, the weather bed and the effects work without any smart lights at all.