I’m building TWS, a small platform for audio-visual storytelling

zohir Benmalek — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 18:52:19 +0000

Hey everyone,

I’m building The Whispering Stories (TWS) — a small independent project at https://tws.rest/.

The idea came from wanting to experiment with a different way of consuming short stories.

Instead of presenting a story as a normal page of text, TWS combines writing, narration, and visual scenes into one experience.

You can read the story yourself, or listen to the narration while the scenes change as the story progresses.

Why I started it

I’ve always found the boundary between books, podcasts, and video interesting.

A book gives you complete control over the pace, but everything is left to your imagination.

A podcast gives you narration and atmosphere, but the visual side is mostly absent.

Video gives you text, audio, and visuals together, but the creator controls almost the entire pace.

I wanted to experiment somewhere in the middle.

With TWS, each story is broken into scenes, with the text, audio, and imagery connected to those scenes.

The technical challenge

The interesting part of the project hasn't really been making another website.

The harder problem is coordinating all of the content.

A single story can have:

The written narrative
Individual scenes
Images for each scene
Narration
Timing information
Metadata for the website

Those assets need to stay synchronized and load efficiently in the browser.

I’ve been building the project around a fairly simple web stack and gradually adding the infrastructure needed to handle the content.

Keeping the experience simple

I don't want TWS to become another social network or infinite-scroll content site.

The goal is much simpler:

Open a story → start reading or listening → experience the story.

There are no complicated workflows required to understand what the website is for.

That simplicity is something I’m trying to preserve as the project grows.

The part I'm still figuring out

The biggest question for me is whether combining these formats actually makes stories better.

There are obvious advantages.

A visual scene can establish a location immediately. Narration can make the experience more immersive. Text gives the reader control.

But there are also potential problems.

Too many visual changes could become distracting. Narration might feel too slow or too fast. Images might interfere with the reader's imagination rather than enhance it.

So I'm treating TWS as an ongoing experiment rather than pretending I've already found the perfect format.

What's next

I'm planning to keep expanding the story library while improving the actual reading/listening experience.

Some of the areas I'm particularly interested in are better synchronization between narration and scenes, improving performance, making the interface more accessible, and eventually making the storytelling format more interactive.

At this stage, I'm mainly looking for feedback from other indie hackers.

Does this combination of text + narration + visual scenes feel useful to you, or does it feel like unnecessary complexity compared with simply reading a story?

The project is live here:

https://tws.rest/