Books, pre-1930
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice, Moby-Dick, A Tale of Two Cities and their contemporaries. Public domain, clean editions, no publisher headers left in.
Starter set free · Full shelf in PlusA fill-in-the-blank word-swap story game for iPhone · Ages 13+
Your text never leaves your phone.
Pick a famous passage, blank out a few of its words, fill them with worse ones, and hear the result read aloud. The AI that makes it work runs on the phone in your hand, so the passage, the blanks and your nonsense are nobody’s business but yours.
Coming soon to the App Store
See a finished ParaLaff
- On-device AI
- Public-domain library
- Ages 13+
- Share out, no feed to scroll
9:41
The Gettysburg Address · 1863
How many of each to blank out?
Nothing was uploaded to do this.
Create 5 blanks
Where the work happens
The whole game fits inside the phone. So does your text.
Most “smart” apps send your words to a server to be understood. ParaLaff carries a small language model in its pocket and does the understanding on the device. There is no upload step to worry about, because there is no upload step.
The model lives on the device. A compact language model is downloaded once, then tags nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs offline. Airplane Mode is a perfectly good place to play.
Categories are a word list, not a lookup service. “Red” is always a colour. The app recognises “A colour”, “A vehicle” or “A food” from a plain list on the phone; nothing is queried.
What does leave the phone is boring. Your sign-in, your purchase receipt and the model download. Never the passage, never the blanks, never what you put in them. The privacy policy spells it out.
A finished ParaLaff
Take famous words. Make them considerably less famous.
A ParaLaff is a passage with a few of its words swapped for yours. Lincoln did the hard part in 1863; you supply the plumbers. The swapped words wear the yellow highlighter, which is how you know whose fault they are.
Your wordEverything else: Abraham Lincoln, public domain
The Gettysburg Address · 1863 · 5 blanksPublic domain
Four score and seven centuries ago our plumbers brought forth on this trampoline, a new nation, conceived in Marmalade, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created sparkly.
Same five blanks, different nonsense. In the app you would type, roll, or pick from a dictionary.
How it works
Three screens between a passage and a ParaLaff.
Choose how many words to lose, fill the blanks without seeing where they go, then read the damage. Every screen below is the app, drawn to scale.
Decide how much to ruin
The on-device model tags every noun, verb, adjective and adverb. Sliders set how many of each become blanks.
9:41
The Gettysburg Address · 1863
How many of each to blank out?
Nothing was uploaded to do this.
Create 5 blanks
Fill the blanks blind
The blanks arrive shuffled, so you never know which sentence you are sabotaging. Type a word, roll the dice, or pick from a dictionary.
9:41
Dictionary: Space Opera
Dice picks a noun from the chosen dictionary.
Next blank
Read the damage. Aloud.
Your words return to the passage in yellow highlighter. The phone reads it back, lighting each word as it goes.
9:41
The Gettysburg Address · 1863
Four score and seven centuries ago our plumbers brought forth on this trampoline, a new nation, conceived in Marmalade, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created sparkly.
0:07 / 0:19
- Type itThe purist’s method. Your vocabulary, your consequences.
- Roll the diceA random word of the right kind from whichever dictionary you chose.
- Browse a dictionaryPlain English, a themed pack, or a custom list of your own.
- Mind the promptSome blanks ask for “A colour” or “A vehicle” rather than “A noun”. Obey it or don’t.
Source library · Provenance
Great writing, honestly obtained.
Everything in the built-in library is yours to mangle without a lawyer present: work old enough to belong to everyone, documents your government published for you, and the words you bring yourself.
US government documents
The Constitution’s preamble, the Declaration of Independence and other federal works, which by law belong to the public. Founding documents hold up surprisingly well to a plumber or two.
Starter set free · Full shelf in PlusFamous speeches, pre-1930
The Gettysburg Address is the house favourite: two minutes long, ten sentences, and it has survived worse than us. Only speeches old enough to be public domain are included.
Starter set free · Full shelf in PlusYour own text
Paste anything: a group-chat message, a recipe, the terms of service you never read. Plus members can also point the camera at a page and capture the text from a photo. It is processed on the phone like everything else.
A few a day free · Unlimited + camera in PlusOur rule for the library: published before 1930, written by the US federal government, or released to the public domain outright. Nothing else gets in, however tempting. What you paste yourself is your business, and stays on your phone.
Dictionaries
Words to fill the holes with.
The dice and the browse button both draw from a dictionary. The plain English one is free and enormous. The themed packs are small, curated and written by us, under names we made up ourselves.
- Plain English free
- Space Opera
- Galactic Adventure
- Fantasy Quest
- Slang
- Spooky
- Seasonal packs
- Your custom lists
Themed packs are part of ParaLaff Plus. Custom lists are yours to build; we do not feature or promote them.
Semantic categories
Some blanks know what they used to be.
When the original word is a recognisable kind of thing, the blank asks for that kind of thing instead of “A noun”. Thirteen categories, spotted from a plain word list on the device, not a model and not a server.
- A colour
- A vehicle
- A food
- A drink
- A pet
- An animal
- A piece of furniture
- A body part
- An article of clothing
- A holiday
- A place
- A job
- A celebrity
Worked example. In “a red waistcoat”, red is tagged as an adjective and is on the colour list, so the blank asks for A colour. Fill it from Space Opera and the dice offers nebula-pink. “Orange” is a colour as an adjective but A food as a noun; the category only applies when the grammar agrees. The celebrity list names nobody real, only made-up personas: a reality-TV chef, the local weather presenter.
Visual themes
Dressed for the occasion.
A theme restyles the game and the finished story: palette, type, a little ambient animation, a discreet sound or two, and the colour of the highlighter itself. The app suggests one from the calendar; you always have the final say.
Default
The classic yellow. Always free.
conceived in Marmalade
Halloween
Orange on black, a creaking door.
conceived in Marmalade
Valentine’s Day
Rose, drifting hearts.
conceived in Marmalade
Christmas
Evergreen, sleigh bells, falling snow.
conceived in Marmalade
Birthday, and more seasons as they come round. Sound effects respect the mute switch and never talk over the read-aloud voice. A starter set is free; the full collection is part of ParaLaff Plus.
Read-aloud
Hearing it is half the joke.
The finished ParaLaff reads itself out in a perfectly serious voice, lighting each word as it is spoken. Something about a synthetic baritone committing fully to “trampoline” does it every time.
- Your phone’s own voices. System text-to-speech, so nothing is recorded or sent anywhere to be spoken.
- Speech settings. Voice, rate and pitch, with a “Preview voice” button so you can audition the cast.
- Karaoke highlighting. The spoken word lights up in the passage, word by word, so everyone in the room follows along.
- Premium voices, later. Richer neural voices are on the roadmap as a Plus add-on. The standard ones are already funnier than they should be.
Four score and seven centuries ago our plumbers brought forth on this trampoline, a new nation, conceived in Marmalade
0:08 / 0:19
Voice DanielRate 0.9×Pitch 1.0
Sharing
Share it out. There is nothing to scroll.
Every finished ParaLaff exports as a styled share card or a karaoke video with the read-aloud baked in. Send it wherever your people already are. Both exports are free, and will stay free.
- Share card. The passage, your highlighted words, the source line, the wordmark. Image-sized for a message or a story.
- Karaoke video. The read-aloud, with word-by-word highlighting, rendered on the phone into a short clip.
- Share-out only. ParaLaff has no feed, no followers, no comments and no strangers. Your story goes where you send it and nowhere else.
Ages 13+ · Presentable at the dinner table
Funny without being the kind of funny you have to explain to a parent.
ParaLaff is for anyone thirteen and up, and it is built so the adults in the room can relax. Here is what that means in practice, in plain terms, because plain terms are the whole point.
Curated dictionaries
Every first-party word list is written and reviewed by us. The themes are space, fantasy, slang, spooky and the seasons. That is the whole list.
No feed, no strangers
There is no public timeline, no messaging and no profiles. Stories leave only when you send them.
Text stays on the device
Passages, blanks and answers are processed and stored on the phone. We could not read them if we wanted to, and we have designed things so that we do not want to.
Honest about ads
The free tier shows a few ordinary ads to keep the lights on. Any payment, of any size, removes every ad forever. We will never show an ad to someone who has paid.
One account, Apple or Google
Sign in with the account you already have. Our server keeps only what it needs to recognise you, never a password; the privacy policy lists it exactly. Account deletion will live in Settings, in the app.
A library a teacher would approve of
Lincoln, Austen, Carroll, Melville, Dickens and the Founders. If a passage turns up in an English class, it probably turns up here.
Pricing
Three prices, no surprises, no small print worth hiding.
The game is free and stays free. Plus adds the full library, the camera, the packs and the quiet. Lifetime is Plus without the recurring bit. Any payment at all removes every ad, forever.
Free
$0
The whole game, with a starter library
Full core loop, a curated starter library, a few paste-your-own ParaLaffs a day, system voices, share card and video export. A few ads.
Notify meParaLaff Plus 1-week free trial
$24.99 / year
or $4.99 / month
Camera capture, unlimited custom text and the full library, every themed dictionary, theme and font pack, premium voices and highlight styles as they arrive. Zero ads.
Notify meLifetime
$59.99 once
Everything in Plus, forever
One purchase, no renewals. Future per-minute premium voice add-ons are the only thing not included, and we say so now rather than later.
Notify me| Feature | Free | ParaLaff Plus | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|---|
| Play | |||
| Full game loopSliders, shuffled blanks, dice, highlighted result | Included | Included | Included |
| On-device processingYour text never leaves your phone | Included | Included | Included |
| Text | |||
| Built-in library | Curated starter set | Full library | Full library |
| Paste your own text | A few a day | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Camera capturePhotograph a page, play the page | Not included | Included | Included |
| Words and looks | |||
| Dictionaries | Plain English | All themed packs | All themed packs |
| Visual themes | Starter set | All themes | All themes |
| Font packs and highlight styles | Not included | Included | Included |
| Voice and sharing | |||
| Read-aloud with karaoke highlighting | System voices | System + premium voicesComing later | System + premium voicesComing later · Future metered minutes excluded |
| Share card and karaoke videoAlways free. Sharing is how the joke travels. | Included | Included | Included |
| Price | |||
| Ads | A few | None, ever | None, ever |
| Cost | $0 | $24.99 / year or $4.99 / month · 1-week free trial | $59.99 one-time |
Any payment removes every ad, forever. Not for a year. Forever.
Nothing sold once will be paywalled later. A one-time purchase means once.
Purchases go through Apple. Cancel, restore or refund from your Apple account, as with any app.
Questions, answered plainly
The things a careful person asks before installing anything.
What is the age rating?
13+. The dictionaries are curated, there is no chat, feed or contact between users, and the library is the kind of thing assigned in school. The account and the store listing are for thirteen and up.
What actually leaves my phone?
Not the passage, not the blanks, not the words you fill them with, not the audio. Those are processed by a language model that runs on the device and are stored on the device.
Three ordinary things do travel: your sign-in details (Apple or Google, exchanged for a session with our server), your purchase receipt (handled by Apple), and a one-time download of the language model itself. If you use the notify-me form on this page, your email address, once it is wired up. The privacy policy lists exactly what each one contains.
What is free, exactly?
The entire game: sliders, shuffled blanks, dice, the highlighted result and read-aloud with the phone’s own voices. A curated starter library, a few pasted-in texts a day, and the share card and karaoke video, which will always be free. The free tier shows a few ads; Plus and Lifetime show none.
Android?
After iPhone. We are launching on one platform, getting it right, and following with Android once the iPhone version has proved itself. Leave your email above and we will tell you the moment either one ships.
Does it work offline?
Yes. Once the language model has downloaded (once, over Wi-Fi; it is a large file, a few gigabytes on most phones), tagging, playing and reading aloud all work with the radio off. The built-in library is on the device too.
Which dictionaries are there, and who writes them?
A large plain-English dictionary (free) and our own themed packs: Space Opera, Galactic Adventure, Fantasy Quest, Slang, Spooky and seasonal packs. We write and review every word. You can also build custom lists of your own; we do not feature or promote them.
Can I use my own text? Is that safe?
Paste anything you like, or with Plus photograph a page and the text is captured from the image. Your own text is processed exactly like the library: on the phone, stored on the phone. We never see it. Whether it is safe to turn your aunt’s holiday newsletter into a ParaLaff is between you and your aunt.
How do I delete my account or get a refund?
Account deletion will live in the app under Settings, before launch, and will remove your sign-in record from our server; your stories were only ever on your phone. Refunds are handled by Apple through your Apple account, as with any App Store purchase. For anything else, support has a monitored address.
Be told once, on launch day.
One email when ParaLaff reaches the App Store, iPhone first and Android after. No drip campaign, no “we miss you”. Your address goes on a list, the list gets used once, and you can leave it with one tap.
Coming soon to the App Store