⭐️ Awarded the Yoto Panel Prize as part of the 2025 Developer Challenge! ⭐️
A dynamic daily playlist of Amazing Animal Facts! Learn something new about the animal kingdom every day!
▶️ Listen and add the free version to your library – 7 days of facts
▶️ Find the full version of Animal Facts in the Yoto Club Collection on your Yoto App (in the Discover Tab) – Over 100 facts, with new facts being added soon!
Thanks to the Yoto community for their support for the card and we're so glad that people are enjoying listening to it.
User information
Add the free or full version of the card to your library.
You can then either play it through the Yoto app or link it to a MYO card, so that you (or someone you know!) can listen to it on their Yoto Player.
Why two versions?
The application itself is hosted by me (not Yoto) so as usage of the card goes up, so unfortunately does the cost of keeping the app running.
As part of a trial being run by Yoto, we're experimenting with having two versions of Animal Facts; a free version, and a full version available as part of the Yoto Club Digital Collection. Listening to the full version of Animal Facts helps support the ongoing costs involved with developing the application and means we can work on improving it even more in the future with more facts and features.
Technical information
All the content and facts are written by humans (myself, my wife Sarah and my daughters Alice and Izzy!).
The narration of the facts is done by my daughter Alice (we re-recorded it after feedback from the community - it previously used AI narration).
- The application was coded using JavaScript/NodeJS.
- It uses Netlify Edge functions for the audio requests. Depending on which track you're on, this dynamically works out which audio file to serve to you and which icon to display. So if it's morning, you'll hear slightly different audio to in the evening, and if you're based in the UK, you'll get slightly different audio to someone listening in the US.
- The majority of the audio and icons are stored and served from a Cloudflare R2 bucket. The edge functions work out which audio file to send to each user and then stream it directly from this bucket. This also means I can make use of Cloudflare's CDN for these files.
Data storage
The app accesses the location and timezone of the request when the card is played. This is not stored, but is used to work out which audio to send back to the user to make the audio more personalised.
Special Thanks to:
My daughters, Alice and Izzy, for their amazing animal facts! I primarily made this card as a fun project to create with them, and they help a lot with finding really interesting facts!
Molly Nye, who illustrated the amazing Animal Facts card cover!
I used a mix of Yoto's official icons and some custom ones from the awesome Yoto Icons website.
We'd love to hear any feedback – please let us know your thoughts in the comments! (and ideas for improvements)