Today we are introducing FoxLeaf, the first app from TRON Technologies, designed and built by founder Tom Moore. FoxLeaf turns an audiobook into something you can watch as well as hear. You press play, and as the narrator reads, the app draws the story: the room, the weather, the people, the moment that is happening right now. Nothing was made in advance and nothing was adapted. The pictures come from the words as they arrive.
Here is what that looks like in practice. You open a book, either an MP3 you already own or one of the tens of thousands of public domain titles in Foxy's Library, and choose one of twelve art styles. Playback starts immediately. Scenes appear alongside the narration and change as the story changes. When a character walks into a lit kitchen at midnight, you see a lit kitchen at midnight. When the story moves to the harbor two chapters later, the harbor is what is on screen. You are still listening to a full, unabridged book in the author's own words. There is simply something to look at that belongs to it.
Three things make FoxLeaf different from anything else we have seen, and each of them was a deliberate engineering decision rather than a feature we added at the end.
The illustrations are generated in real time. There is no waiting for a book to process, no progress bar between you and the story. You press play and the visuals keep pace with the narrator, who never pauses and never waits for the app to catch up. A picture that arrives ninety seconds late is worse than no picture at all, so staying in step became the constraint the whole engine was built around.
The characters stay the same people. This is the hard one. Most AI image tools are very good at making one striking picture and very bad at making the same person twice, which is fine for a single illustration and fatal across an eleven-hour novel. FoxLeaf holds onto who the characters are and where they are as the book progresses, so the person you meet in chapter one is recognizably the same person in chapter thirty. The house stays the house. The ship stays the ship. Without that continuity, illustrations become noise on top of the story instead of support for it.
The heavy work happens on your device. Playback, transcription, and the image rendering itself all run on the phone in your hand rather than on our servers. Your audio files are never uploaded, and we are not building a record of your reading life. One part does need a connection: to decide what each illustration should show, a short passage of the transcript is sent out to build the prompt, and the picture is then rendered locally. So the books themselves stay with you, but illustrating a new scene is not something the app can do with no signal at all.
The rest is meant to stay out of the way. Switch art styles mid-chapter without losing your place. Mirror the whole thing to a television so a book becomes something a room can share. Keep everything in a personal library that remembers where you stopped in each title. There is no subscription: pricing starts at $2.99 per book and scales with the length of the file, so a quiet month costs nothing.
FoxLeaf is coming soon to iOS and Android. In the meantime we will be writing about the parts worth understanding before you open it.