ParaLaff Notify me
Coming soon to the App Store

Turn famous words into ridiculous ones.

ParaLaff is a fill-in-the-blank story game for iPhone. Pick a passage, blank out the good bits, put your own words in, and hear the result read aloud with a straight face. There is one loaded and waiting for you right here.

Your text never leaves your phone.

Demo form — this mockup stores nothing. The launch build posts to a Serverpod endpoint. No spam, one email on launch day, maybe one before.

Launching first on iPhone. Android after. Rated 13+.

Try a sample ParaLaff

Start from a sample:
Blank 1 of 8

Give meA noun

In the app, on-device AI tags any text you paste or photograph. This web demo uses a pre-tagged passage, and the read-aloud is your browser's own voice.

Rated 13+. Public-domain passages, generic themed dictionaries, and an AI that runs on the phone, not in a data centre.
How it works

Four taps from Lincoln to lunacy.

You just did steps three and four. Here is the whole loop, as it looks on the phone.

  1. Pick a passage

    A classic from the library, a famous old speech, a government document, or anything you paste. Plus members can photograph a page.

  2. Choose how many to blank

    On-device AI tags every noun, verb, adjective and adverb. Sliders decide how many of each disappear. Two nouns is polite; nine is chaos.

  3. Fill the blanks, shuffled

    The blanks arrive out of order so you cannot see the joke coming. Type a word, roll the dice, or pick from a themed dictionary.

  4. Read, laugh, share

    Your words come back in yellow highlighter. The phone reads it aloud, word by word, and exports a share card or a karaoke video.

The library

Only the finest words. Then we ruin them.

Everything built in is public domain or published by the United States government, which means nobody minds what you do to it.

Pre-1930 classics

Novels that have earned it

  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
  • Pride and Prejudice
  • Moby-Dick
  • A Tale of Two Cities
  • Frankenstein, Dracula, and other well-dressed nightmares
Famous old speeches

Oratory, lightly sabotaged

  • The Gettysburg Address (the house favourite)
  • Washington's Farewell Address
  • Lincoln's Second Inaugural
  • Sojourner Truth, 1851
  • Anything before 1930 and out of copyright
US government documents

Prose your taxes paid for

  • The Preamble to the Constitution
  • The Declaration of Independence
  • The Bill of Rights
  • Selected federal reports, forms and field guides
Yours

Anything you paste or photograph

  • Paste a paragraph from anywhere (free, a few a day)
  • Photograph a page and let OCR read it (Plus)
  • Feed a finished ParaLaff back in and see how deep it goes
Dictionaries & categories

The dice know the difference between a noun and a vehicle.

Every dictionary supplies words by part of speech and by category. Blanks are prompted the same way, so a vehicle blank filled from Space Opera gives you a shuttlecraft, not a milk float.

Free English

Thousands of perfectly ordinary words, deployed at the worst possible moment.

Space Opera

Hyperdrives, docking bays, and a food group called protein cube.

Galactic Adventure

Brighter, sillier, more moon buggies. For crews who name their ship.

Fantasy Quest

Goblets, prophecies, one very tired wizard.

Slang

Words your English teacher pretended not to know.

Spooky

Cobwebs and cauldrons. Pairs alarmingly well with the Halloween theme.

Seasonal

Valentine's, Christmas, Birthday and more, rotating with the calendar.

Free English is included. The themed packs come with ParaLaff Plus. You can also build a custom dictionary of your own words.

Thirteen categories the app recognises

When the original word is a colour, the blank asks for a colour. The recognition happens on your phone with a plain word list, which is faster and more accurate than asking a model whether red is red.

A colourA petA piece of furnitureA vehicleA body partAn article of clothingA holidayA celebrityA foodA drinkA placeA jobAn animal
A vehicle, four ways
Free Englisha milk float
Space Operaa shuttlecraft
Fantasy Questa royal carriage
Spookya hearse

Celebrity blanks are filled with invented personas ("a reality-TV chef", "the local weather presenter"). No real person is named, ever.

Visual themes

Same sentence, different costume.

A theme restyles the game and the result: palette, fonts, decorations, and the highlighter itself. The app suggests one from the calendar; you can always overrule it.

Halloween

…conceived in Cobwebs, and dedicated to the proposition that all werewolves are created creaky.

Creaky-door stinger. Drifting bats. Orange highlighter.

Valentine's Day

…conceived in Marmalade, and dedicated to the proposition that all flamingos are created velvety.

Drifting hearts. Pink highlighter. Frankly, too much.

Christmas

…conceived in Gravy, and dedicated to the proposition that all geese are created enormous.

Falling snow. Sleigh bells, quietly.

Birthday

…conceived in Trifle, and dedicated to the proposition that all accountants are created wobbly.

Confetti on completion. Striped highlighter.

Themes ship with their own animations and sound effects. Sounds respect your mute switch and never talk over the read-aloud. A starter set of themes is free; the full collection is part of Plus.

Read-aloud

Hearing it is half the joke.

Your phone reads the finished ParaLaff in a perfectly serious voice while the words light up karaoke-style. You will not be able to keep a straight face. It will.

Word-by-word highlighting

Each word lights up as it is spoken, which is exactly the moment your own word lands.

Your voices, your speed

Uses the voices already on your iPhone. Pick one, slow it down, drop the pitch. Solemn works best.

Premium voices, later

Richer neural voices are on the roadmap as a Plus add-on. The free system voices are already very good at deadpan.

Pricing

Free to play. Cheap to go overboard.

Three tiers. Any payment removes every ad, forever. Sharing is free on all of them, because that is how you find us.

Free
$0

The whole game, a curated starter library.

  • Full core loop: sliders, shuffled blanks, dice, highlighter
  • Starter library and a few pasted texts a day
  • Free English dictionary, starter themes
  • System read-aloud with karaoke highlighting
  • Share card and video export
Notify me
1-week free trial ParaLaff Plus
$24.99/year

or $4.99 a month. Annual is the sensible one.

  • Camera capture: photograph any page
  • Unlimited pasted text and the full library
  • All themed dictionaries and font packs
  • All visual themes, premium highlight styles
  • Premium voices as a metered add-on, when they arrive. Zero ads.
Notify me
Lifetime
$59.99 once

Everything in Plus, forever. No renewals to remember.

  • Every Plus feature, permanently
  • Every future dictionary, theme and font pack
  • Zero ads, forever
  • Future metered premium-voice minutes are the one exclusion
Notify me

Prices in US dollars, billed through the App Store. Nothing sold once will ever be paywalled later.

Questions

Reasonable questions, answered plainly.

Who is this for? What is the age rating?

Anyone thirteen and up who enjoys a good sentence going badly. ParaLaff is rated 13+. The built-in library, dictionaries and themes are family-presentable; what you paste in stays on your phone.

Where does my text go?

Nowhere. Your text never leaves your phone. The parts-of-speech tagging runs on a small language model downloaded to the device, and the category recognition is a word list. No passage is sent to a server for processing. Sign-in and purchases use an account; the words do not.

What is free?

The entire game on a curated starter library, a few pasted texts a day, the Free English dictionary, starter themes, system read-aloud with karaoke highlighting, and every export. Plus adds camera capture, unlimited text, the full library, all dictionaries, themes and highlight styles, and removes the ads.

Android?

After iPhone. The launch is iPhone-first; Android follows once the iOS version has found its feet. Leave an email above and you will hear about both.

Why can't the web demo use my own text?

Because tagging happens on the phone, not on a server, and we would rather not start sending your text anywhere just for a website. The demo uses passages tagged in advance. The app tags whatever you give it.

Can I make my own dictionary?

Yes. A custom dictionary is a list of your own words sorted by part of speech and category. Inside jokes, family names, the cat. The dice will use it like any other.

When does it launch?

iPhone first, Android after. We are not printing a date until it is certain; the status line on this page is the one we keep honest, and the email list is how you hear first. There is no store listing yet, which is why the button below asks for an email rather than pretending to be a badge.

Launch list

Be first to ruin a classic.

One email on launch day. Possibly one before, if we find a very good walrus.

Coming soon to the App Store

Demo form — this mockup stores nothing. The launch build posts to a Serverpod endpoint.