Animal Facts

A dynamic daily playlist of Amazing Animal Facts!

Learn something new about the animal kingdom every day!

Hosted by Alice, wannabe future Zoologist
Age 7, from South Wales.

📖 Usage

Add the card to your Yoto library via this link.

Then you can either play it through the Yoto app, or link it to a Make Your Own Yoto card so that you (or someone you know!) can listen to it on their Yoto Player.

To link Animal Facts to a MYO card, you need to use the Yoto app and click 'link to a card' – see the image below.

📢 Send Facts and Feedback

If you have any suggestions for new animal facts, please drop us an email!

If you include your fact, first name, age and where you're from, we'll make sure to read this out when we get to your fact in the future.

If you have any other feedback – feel free to email us, or fire a message to us on BlueSky, X (Twitter), or LinkedIn!

We'd also love it if you could share it with any other parents or children that you know!

🙏 Thanks

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 helped 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.

❓ FAQs

Is the content created by a human, or by AI?

All the content and facts have been written by humans (myself and my daughters Alice and Izzy!).

The narration is done by my daughter Alice. She's just turned 7 and is a massive animal enthusiast!

Can you make a translated version of the card?

I really wanted to do this! Unfortunately, Yoto doesn't send any language headers as part of the streaming audio requests, so I would have had to have guessed your language based on your location – which isn't ideal, as not everyone in a certain country will want to hear it in a specific language.

If this data is passed along as part of the card request data in the future by Yoto – or if anyone has any other ideas as to how to do this – I'd love to extend the card into other languages too!

Do you collect any user details?

No. The only data that is used by the card is your location (which is worked out via your IP address) and your timezone to personalise the content to you. The intro/outro audio will change based on your time of day and month, and location is mentioned occasionally in the audio too.

This data isn't stored anywhere - it is just used when working out which tracks to play you.

💻 Technical Details

The application was coded using JavaScript/NodeJS.
For the architecture itself, I use 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.