Wisp — Frequently Asked Questions

A daily kids' podcast app for the school run. Wisp has two parts:

• Today's News — a 10-minute bulletin for curious 5–11 year-olds. Real news, pitched for kids — warm, curious, never sensational. The same show for everyone.
• Topic episodes — a growing library of ~5-minute shows across 13 themes (dinosaurs, space, weird history, makers, mindset…). Your child picks the themes they love and Wisp draws today's topic from those.

The whole thing is queued up overnight and plays without signal. Your child says "Hey Siri, play my daily Wisp" and the car listens to that day's show.

Designed for 5–11 year olds. Scripts are pitched at the comprehension of a curious 7–9 year old, which our editorial review finds works for the whole range: younger kids absorb the gist and ask great follow-up questions, older kids engage with the detail.

Yes — and we take this seriously. Three layers:

• Source curation — we choose a narrow set of trusted feeds (BBC News and a handful of evergreen topic banks), not the open web.
• Per-topic guardrails — every news category has an explicit "skip entirely" list (court cases, layoffs, data breaches, anything graphic) and a "lean toward" list (animal rescues, festivals, science, sport).
• Script-level rules — the AI scriptwriter follows a long set of "never use these words / never frame things this way" instructions, then the script is checked before audio is generated.

You can also report any individual episode from the in-app player (tap ⋯ → "Report this episode"). A real person looks at every report.

Both — and we think you should know which bit is which.

• What the AI does: the daily scripts are drafted by AI from a tightly-scoped editorial brief we wrote (covering tone, vocabulary, topic boundaries, what to skip). The narration is generated by AI voices (Alex and Sam) — they're consistent, warm, and clear, which is useful for daily content on a small budget.
• What we do: we set the editorial brief, choose the topic catalogue, pick the news feeds, write the safety rules the AI follows, and check what's been produced. The "Report this episode" button on every show goes straight to a real human, and a real human acts on it.

We use AI because it lets us produce a fresh, age-appropriate ~10–15 minute show every morning — at a quality and consistency the budget of a one-dad operation couldn't match by hand. We don't use it to cut corners on safety: every category has explicit "skip these things" rules, and every script is constrained by them before audio is ever generated.

If that doesn't sit right with you, completely fair — we'd rather you knew. Email hello@wispdaily.com with thoughts; the team is one person and that person reads everything.

Fair question — and the honest answer is: for the school run, an app does things a podcast feed structurally cannot.

• Hands-free, drive-length matched. "Hey Siri, play my daily Wisp" plays today's show, padded to fit the length of your drive. A podcast feed plays whichever episode you tapped last, regardless of how long the drive is.
• Ad model under our control. On Spotify Free, your child is hearing gambling, dating and financial ads on the way to school. We will never run those.
• A real safety lever. Tap ⋯ → "Report this episode" sends the report straight to us. A real person sees it and acts. On a podcast platform, the report is one of millions and goes nowhere meaningful.
• Today's show is today's. The app pushes today's episode as the default action. On a podcast feed, your child can tap last month's "Today's News" by mistake.
• Plays without signal. Wisp downloads the day's episodes in the morning, so they play through tunnels, multi-storey car parks, dead spots and that 100-metre stretch outside school where the bars always drop. Spotify Free won't even start without a connection. Apple Podcasts needs you to remember to download. We just handle it.

We plan to publish Wisp on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well — that's how parents discover us. The app is for the daily ritual.

Free at the point of use. No subscription. Nothing to unlock. Your child can listen as much as they want, on as many days as they want.

Wisp may carry sponsorships or ads in future — see the "Are there ads?" question below for the rules we'll hold ourselves to.

Yes — once today's episodes have downloaded, they play without signal. Useful for tunnels, the M25, and rural drives. Episodes you mark as favourites stay cached.

The main phrase to teach your child is:

"Hey Siri, play my daily Wisp"

That plays today's full pool — usually 10–15 minutes of news + topics. Other useful phrases:

• "Hey Siri, lucky dip Wisp" — a surprise mix of today's content + the back catalogue.
• "Hey Siri, play my favourite Wisps" — episodes you've hearted.

CarPlay support is coming soon. For now, Wisp plays through the car's stereo over Bluetooth or via a phone cable — and Siri works hands-free either way.

Yes — but with caveats. The content is age-appropriate by design (see safety above). There's nothing in the app that can take a child somewhere unexpected: no chat, no comments, no user-generated content, no external links opening in-app. The "Report this episode" button is the only outbound action and it's a form, not a free-text submission anywhere public.

That said, podcasts work best as a shared experience — the curiosity questions are richer when there's an adult around to chat with.

iPhone and iPad at launch, with AirPods or any car Bluetooth / aux cable for in-car listening. CarPlay support is coming soon. Android is on the roadmap but a few months out — building a kids' app properly on two platforms at once is too much for one founder. If Android matters to you, sign up at wispdaily.com — we use the list to gauge timing.

Not today. If we introduce advertising or sponsorships in future, the rules are clear:

• Audience-appropriate, always. Whatever runs has to be suitable for kids hearing it on a school run — no adult products, no gambling, no dating, no anything we wouldn't be comfortable with our own kids hearing.
• No profiling. Ads or sponsors are never chosen based on data about your child. We don't have that data and never will.
• No third-party ad networks. We pick the partners ourselves. Each sponsor is announced in the episode in plain English.

Any change to this position would be announced in-app before it took effect, and the privacy policy would update first.

A wisp is something small, bright, and momentary — like a curious thought a kid has on the school run that you've got just enough time to chase before you pull into the car park. The gold sparkle in the logo is that wisp.

Two routes today: (1) tap ⋯ → "Report this episode" if a specific episode shouldn't have aired — we pull it. (2) Email hello@wispdaily.com with topic-level requests. Per-family topic exclusions are on the roadmap for a future version once we understand what families actually ask to filter out.

Ben — a product professional and entrepreneur, and a dad. Wisp is a product I built because I'm passionate about giving kids high-quality learning opportunities, and about helping parents handle the daily reality of entertaining children without falling back on screens. Based in the UK.

Email hello@wispdaily.com. Real person, usually replies within a day.