Splats app uses AI to turn your photos into coloring pages for kids | TechCrunch

The team at Retro, a photo-sharing app for close friends and family, is experimenting with how generative AI can be put to more creative uses. To try out the latest, cutting-edge AI technologies, the team built a new app called Splat, which lets you turn any photo into a coloring book page for kids.

As any parent will tell you, kids love to color. And thanks to the web, there’s a seemingly infinite number of coloring book pages available for printing at home.

However, many of the websites hosting these pages are filled with ads and other clutter, making them difficult to navigate. Other times, the printable pages are only available for a small fee, which some parents don’t want to pay, given the disposable nature of much of kids’ scribbled-on art projects.

That inspired Retro’s team to develop an app for printing coloring book pages at home — from either your own photos or those it provides in kid-friendly, educational categories, such as animals, space, flowers, fairy tales, robots, cars, and more.

To get started with Splat, you’ll take a picture or pick a photo from your Camera Roll. You can then choose what style of photo you’d like to color — such as anime, 3D movie, manga, cartoon, or comic. The app will then transform your picture using AI into either an on-screen or printable page for kids to color.

Instead of requiring a tedious sign-up process, the app will step you through customization options the first time you begin creating. Here, you’re prompted to choose your preferred app icon and check off the various categories your child likes. You also can choose if you want to let kids color the photo as a printable page or on-screen (great in a pinch when kids are bored, but you don’t want them sucked into a TV show or game).

You can try one generative AI project to get a feel for the app. It then costs either $4.99 per week or $49.99 per year to continue to generate new pictures. The weekly option allows for 25 pages per week, and the annual option provides 500 pages per year. The option to purchase or access the settings is blocked from small children by a pop-up that requires the parent’s birth year.

In brief tests, the app worked as promised, and the generation time was brief, allowing you to quickly move from idea to printed art, ready for coloring, cutouts, or anything else your child wants to do.

Splat is one of several experiments that uses generative AI to help inspire kids’ creativity and imagination in new ways. Another, Stickerbox, offers printed AI-generated stickers for coloring, while Casio also launched a fluffy robotic pet called Moflin that uses AI to develop its personality over time.

Splat is available on iOS and Android.