Story Medicine - Android app turning a voice note or pasted text into a therapeutic story for a child, read aloud with Edge neural voices
# Therapeutic Stories Turn a voice note into a story a child can hear. A parent describes what is happening — a death, a move, a fear, a hard week — by voice or by pasting text. The app returns a short therapeutic story: the situation translated into metaphor, with characters the child can project onto, no stated moral, and a safe ending. Then it reads it aloud in a warm neural voice. Croatian and English. **Status: scaffold. See [HANDOFF.md](HANDOFF.md) for the full brief.** ## Why metaphor Direct advice raises a child's defences. A story does not. The child meets their own feeling at one remove — in a fox, a bell, a small creature with a tight tail — and can approach it, or not, at their own speed. The method is old and well documented, and the app's craft rules come from it: metaphor rather than instruction, the feeling externalised into a character, the child character holding agency, and never a stated lesson at the end. ## What it is not Not therapy, not treatment, not medical or psychiatric advice. A tool for starting a conversation between a parent and a child. Where an input suggests a child at risk, the app stops and points to a person instead of producing a story. ## Origin Built out of the children's stories in [Cause and Symptom](https://github.com/markoboskoauroville/CAUSE_AND_SYMPTOM) — seventeen stories in one valley, with one cast, which serve as the reference corpus for tone.