Tail Tales 🐾 — Turning Your Dog Into the Star of Their Own Story

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition

What I Built

Tail Tales — a small web app that turns your dog into the star of their own short story. You enter your dog's name, breed, and one quirky habit, pick a genre (mystery, comedy, heart-warming, or thriller), and Gemini writes a short story told entirely from your dog's point of view, in a voice that matches the genre you picked.

My goal wasn't to build something huge — just something fun, complete, and genuinely well-crafted in a weekend. I am interested in fiction outside of coding, so I wanted to see if I could get an AI to actually write in a voice, not just generate a generic paragraph about a dog.

Demo

Live: tail-tales-pink.vercel.app

Here's a sample story (genre: mystery, dog: Daisy, habit: howls when raining ):

As Chief Detective Daisy—a Golden Retriever of flawless intellect and magnificent fur—I faced my toughest case yet: the Mysterious Missing Squeaky Squirrel. It had vanished off the rug right under my snout. Naturally, I suspected the feline, Barnaby. He looked far too innocent, lounging on the armchair like a smug loaf of bread. Suddenly, patter-patter-patter. Rain! My investigation hit a temporary freeze. The Sky Water had arrived! I threw my head back, inhaled deeply, and performed my sacred civic duty: “AROOOOOOOOO!” It was a glorious, soul-shaking howl. BOING! Barnaby leapt three feet into the air in pure terror, knocking over the laundry basket. Out tumbled my squeaky squirrel! The furry felon had been hiding his contraband under the clean socks! I pounced, triumphantly reclaiming my squeaky prize. Another masterpiece of police work by Detective Daisy. Barnaby glared from atop the bookshelf, but I didn't care; the sky was still leaking, so I pointed my nose high and unleashed another glorious victory AROOOOOO!

Code

GitHub: github.com/DivyaSaroja/tail-tales

How I Built It

• Frontend: plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no framework, kept it simple

• Backend: a Vercel serverless function (api/generate.js) that keeps my Gemini API key private and forwards requests to the Gemini API

• The interesting part was the prompt engineering, not the code. I built a genre-specific guidance system — a thriller gets instructions to build tension and end on a twist, while heart-warming gets told to slow down and focus on one tender moment between the dog and their human. Same structure, very different voice.

• I also had to explicitly tell Gemini to avoid "literary" vocabulary and write in plain, everyday language — early drafts read a little too much like a novel, which didn't match the playful, casual feel I wanted.

• Deployed on Vercel, connected to GitHub for automatic redeploys on every push.

Prize Categories

Submitting for Best Use of Google AI — Gemini is the core of the project, generating the actual story content based on genre-specific prompt engineering.

Comments

[Divya]

try my story creator for your dogs