ParaLaff is a fill-in-the-blank word-swap story game for iPhone. Blank out a famous passage, fill the gaps with nonsense, then hear it performed — every word lit as it's spoken, your swaps in yellow highlighter. Your text never leaves your phone.
One email, on launch day. No newsletter, no drip. Demo form — not yet connected.
You're on the list. We'll write once, when the curtain goes up.Demo — nothing was sent. In production this posts to a Serverpod endpoint.
Four score and seven hamsters ago our plumbers brought forth on this trampoline, a new nation, conceived in Mayonnaise, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created squeaky.
Read aloud with karaoke highlighting
Track 02 · Read it aloud
Tap play and your phone performs the piece — one word at a time, each lighting as it's spoken, so everyone in the room knows exactly when the mayonnaise is coming. Karaoke, except the lyrics are Lincoln's and the mistakes are yours.
Your iPhone already owns a cast of voices in every language and accent it speaks. Choose one, set the pace, nudge the pitch, and preview before the room hears it. The highlighting follows whichever voice you pick.
A curated set of higher-fidelity voices arrives in a later release as a ParaLaff Plus add-on. That is the whole promise — no more, no less — and we'll say more when there is more to say.
Track 04 · Make one
The whole game takes about as long as reading the passage the honest way. Which is the last time you'll read it the honest way.
From the library — pre-1930 classics, famous old speeches, US government documents — or paste anything. Plus members can point the camera at a page.
Start from a sample:
On-device AI tags every noun, verb, adjective and adverb — nothing is uploaded. You decide how many of each to blank out. Two nouns and one adverb is restrained. Nine is a party.
How many of each to blank out?
Tagged on this phone · nothing uploaded
The blanks arrive shuffled, so you can't see them coming. Type a word, roll the dice, or pick from a dictionary. Some blanks know what they used to be: "A colour", "A vehicle", "A food".
Your words drop back into the passage in yellow highlighter. Read it, hear it, share it, then tap Play again — the blanks land somewhere new every time.
We the Raccoons of the United States, in Order to form a more wobbly Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Nachos, provide for the common defence…
Track 05 · Library and dictionaries
The library is chosen so nobody's lawyer needs to hear about it; the dictionaries are chosen so the dice never lands on something dull.
Austen, Carroll, Melville, Dickens and company — public domain, cleanly typeset, and remarkably tolerant of being interrupted by a trombone.
The Gettysburg Address is the house favourite. Everything here is pre-1930, which is why Lincoln appears so often and nobody more recent does.
The Constitution's preamble, the Declaration, and other papers your government has already paid for. Federal prose has never been this wobbly.
A text message, a recipe, the wedding speech you were sent for "feedback". A few a day are free; unlimited with Plus.
Point the camera at a page and the words come off it. Menus, plaques, the back of a cereal box — all fair game, all processed on the phone.
Every dictionary knows its parts of speech — and its categories. When the original word was a colour, a vehicle or a piece of furniture, the blank says so:
"A celebrity" is filled from invented personas — a reality-TV chef, the local weather presenter — because nobody real needs to be in your ParaLaff without asking.
The dice knows the difference. A vehicle blank rolled from Space Opera gives you a shuttle, not a milk float. Roll it from Spooky and you get a hearse. Community dictionaries exist too, though the ones we feature are all our own.
Track 06 · Themes
A theme restyles the game and the result — palette, type, decorations, and the highlighter itself — with ambient flourishes and a sound effect or two, kept quiet so the story stays the star.
Call me Pumpkin. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely…
It is a truth universally smooched, that a single man…
Four score and seven reindeer ago our fathers…
We the Balloons of the United States, in Order to form…
Open the app in late October and it will gently propose Halloween. You can always say no, or pick a Birthday theme in March because it's your birthday in March.
Halloween plus the Spooky dictionary is the obvious double bill. Nothing stops you dressing a Space Opera ParaLaff for Valentine's Day.
A handful of themes ship free. The full collection — with its font packs, highlight styles and sound effects — is part of ParaLaff Plus.
Track 07 · Pricing
The game is free. The stagecraft is not. Sharing is never, ever behind the curtain.
The whole loop, on the house.
or $4.99/month · 1-week free trial
Everything in Plus, forever.
House rule: any payment removes every ad, forever. Nothing sold as a one-time purchase is ever moved behind a subscription later.
Track 08 · Questions from the floor
ParaLaff is rated 13+. The library is public-domain and government text, the first-party dictionaries are all family-presentable, and the funniest word in most rooms turns out to be "trombone". Grown-ups tend to laugh hardest.
Nowhere. The parts of speech are tagged by a small AI model running on your iPhone, and the passage is never uploaded — not for tagging, not for the dice, not for read-aloud. Your text never leaves your phone. The only things that go over the network are signing in, downloading the model once, and any purchase you choose to make.
The full game on a curated starter library, a few paste-your-own ParaLaffs a day, your phone's own voices with karaoke highlighting, and — always — the share card and the karaoke video. Plus adds camera capture, unlimited text, every dictionary and theme, premium voices, and removes ads. Paying anything removes ads forever.
After iPhone. We are launching on iPhone first and building the Android version once that's proven itself. Leave your email above and you'll hear about both.
No feed, no followers, no counters of any kind. You make a ParaLaff and send it where you like — a share card or a karaoke video. We think the best audience for a ParaLaff is the six people who'll actually get it, and you already know who they are.
Your iPhone's built-in voices, in whichever language and accent you choose, with adjustable rate and pitch. A curated set of premium voices is planned for a later release as a Plus add-on. That's the extent of what we're promising about voices.
Encore
One email when ParaLaff lands on the App Store. Then we leave you alone to ruin the Gettysburg Address in peace.
Coming soon to the App Store Demo form — not yet connected.
You're on the list. We'll write once, when the curtain goes up.Demo — nothing was sent. In production this posts to a Serverpod endpoint.