And if we don't, there's a real human at the bottom of this page who will.
Little Vox is free on the App Store →Little Vox is an iPhone app that gets audio onto your child's Yoto player, without you needing to know anything about audio formats, file conversion, or Yoto's API. Pick something, tap send, done. There's no computer involved at any point.
It has two sides. Audiobooks sends a book to a Make Your Own card, either a free public-domain classic from the library built into the app, or an audio file you already own. Family Stories lets grandparents, parents, and anyone with a voice record personal stories for your child. The person recording needs no app at all, just a link and a tap.
It's free on the App Store.
Just three things:
No subscription. No computer. And no Little Vox account. There's nothing to sign up for. You connect your Yoto account once so we can deliver to it, and that's the only login involved.
It's four steps, and step four is basically just waiting:
When it's done, open the Yoto app → Library → Playlists. Your book will be there waiting, cover art included.
Not yet. Little Vox is on iPhone today.
The person recording a Family Story doesn't need the app at all, though. The recording page runs in any modern browser, so Grandma on an Android phone or a Windows laptop can record just fine.
To send anything to a card, yes. You'll need a Yoto player and a Make Your Own card. But Family Stories works standalone: you can collect recordings from family, keep them, and share them as ordinary audio files without any Yoto hardware at all.
If you're Yoto-curious, check them out here ↗. They make a genuinely lovely screen-free player for kids.
Pretty much everything you're likely to have:
M4B MP3 FLAC M4A AAC WAV OGG
If your file is in one of these, Little Vox can send it. Anything more exotic, or anything with copy protection on it, will need converting first.
Yes. There's a Yoto Library tab that lists everything on your Yoto account, whether Little Vox put it there or not. You can see the whole collection at a glance and remove cards your child has outgrown, without switching over to the Yoto app.
The catalogue is filtered by age, 0–5, 6–10, and 10–14, and grouped into themed shelves like Heroes & Virtue and Courageous Girls, so you can browse the way you would in a bookshop rather than guessing at a search box.
Search is there too, if you already know the title you want.
The limits here are Yoto's, not ours. A Make Your Own card allows:
That comfortably covers most children's audiobooks. If your own audiobook file is longer, Little Vox splits it for you: it cuts the book at its chapter marks and spreads it across as many cards as it needs, and shows you the plan first. A book from the free library that's too big for one card can't be split yet, and the app tells you before you send.
Yes, if it's your own file. Pick it in Little Vox and, if it won't fit on one card, the app reads the chapter marks inside it and cuts the book there, so each card gets whole chapters. If the file has no chapter marks, it cuts it into even pieces instead, and you choose how long.
Before anything is sent you'll see the plan, for example "18 hours · 52 tracks · 3 Yoto cards", with a Cancel button next to it.
Not directly: Audible files are DRM-protected, which means only Audible's own apps can read them. This isn't a Little Vox limitation; it's Audible's design. We're not going to pretend otherwise.
The good news: there are excellent sources for DRM-free audiobooks that work perfectly:
Quite a lot, actually. It's just very good at hiding it. When you tap "Send to Yoto," Little Vox reads your file's details, sorts out the cover art, works out the track structure, and uploads everything to your Yoto library through the same API the official Yoto app uses. Yoto then re-encodes the audio to its own specification on their end.
The bit worth knowing: your own audio files go straight from your phone to Yoto. They don't pass through us. That's not a marketing line, it's just how the upload works, the app requests an upload slot from Yoto and sends the file directly to it.
Most of the wait is the upload itself, so it depends on your connection more than anything else. On decent Wi-Fi a book is usually done in a few minutes. Yoto then takes another minute or two to process it on their end before it appears in your library.
You can put your phone down and get on with something else. You'll be told when it's finished.
No. Yoto re-encodes what it receives to its own format, at a quality level suited to spoken word. For audiobooks and voice recordings, which is all we're dealing with here, the result is indistinguishable from the original at any normal listening volume.
Little Vox itself doesn't re-encode your file at all. It sends what you gave it and lets Yoto do the conversion, which means there's no extra generation of quality loss along the way.
Yes, for anything that involves sending or fetching, browsing the free library, downloading a book, and uploading to Yoto all need a connection.
Recording a story is the exception. You can record offline and it's saved safely on your phone; it just waits until you're back online to go anywhere.
Family Stories lets you, or anyone you invite, record a personal story or message for a child's Yoto. You create a story in Little Vox, send a link to your narrator (grandma, grandpa, anyone), and they record directly in their browser. No app, no account, no technical setup on their end.
When they're finished it shows up in Little Vox, you listen to it, and it's ready to send to Yoto. Grandma's voice, on their Yoto, forever. 💜
You can also just record it yourself, right in the app, if the reader is already in the room.
Nope. They tap the link, press record, tell a story. Works in any modern browser on a phone, tablet, or laptop. If your narrator can send a text message, they can record a Storybook.
Yes, the recording page supports multiple chapters. They can record chapter one today, come back tomorrow for chapter two, and Little Vox keeps it all organised. Recording links stay active for 7 days, and any in-progress recording is saved automatically so nothing gets lost if they close the tab by accident.
No. Family Stories is completely free and unlimited: record as many as you like, invite as many people as you like, send them all to your Yoto.
We thought about charging for it and decided against it. A grandparent's voice isn't the thing to put behind a paywall.
Technically, yes. Yoto does let you upload your own audio and record stories directly in their app. But "technically possible" and "actually pleasant to do" are very different things.
Uploading your own audiobooks: Yoto's native upload has strict requirements, specific audio formats, a 100 MB limit per track, a one-hour limit per track, and a fiddly manual process for getting the track order right. Miss any of it and the upload fails, or your book lands on the player in a mess. Getting a full audiobook on there the hard way takes real effort and a fair amount of Googling.
Recording personal stories: Yoto's built-in recording feature is tucked away in the app and assumes you already know where to find it. If you want Grandma to record a bedtime story, you're asking her to download an app, create an account, navigate a menu that wasn't designed with her in mind, and figure it out, all before she's said a single word. Most grandmas give up before they get started. (Most parents do too, honestly.)
Little Vox makes both of these completely effortless:
The app is free. No subscription, no renewal, no "we're changing our pricing model" email in 18 months.
The only thing you can ever pay for is a Premium edition of a specific book, $1.49, one time. You buy the book, not the app, and you never have to buy one at all: the free version of every title is right there next to it.
Free, with no catch and no limit:
$1.49 buys a Premium edition of one book: the same recording, professionally mastered so the volume is even and the hiss is gone, with the volunteer introduction trimmed off the front so the story starts when your child presses play.
Your purchases follow your Apple Account, not your device. Install Little Vox on the new phone, tap Restore Purchases, and every Premium edition you've bought comes back.
There's no licence key to lose and no activation limit to run into. Apple handles all of it.
Depends which kind, and we'd rather be precise about it than give you a reassuring one-liner that isn't quite true.
The full detail, including how long anything is kept, is in the Privacy Policy.
They aren't. We never see them. You sign in on Yoto's own website, and what comes back to the app is an access token, not your password.
That token is kept in the iOS Keychain, the same encrypted store iOS uses for your saved passwords and payment cards. It stays on your phone and is never transmitted to us. You can disconnect at any time, which deletes it.
As little as possible:
Full details in our Privacy Policy: written by humans, not lawyers trying to obscure things.
Yoto occasionally takes a minute or two to index new content. Open the Yoto app, pull down to refresh, then tap Library → Playlists. Give it a moment.
Still nothing? In Little Vox, disconnect your Yoto account and connect it again. That usually does it.
Try again first, uploads are the part most likely to be interrupted by a patchy connection, and a second attempt on Wi-Fi fixes most of them.
If it fails again, the file is probably in a format Yoto won't take, or it's over one of the card limits. Converting it to MP3 with any free tool and re-importing sorts out the format case; if it's a size or length problem, see the question above about file limits.
For your own file, Little Vox should offer to split it across cards for you (see the long audiobook question). If the file is a lossless format like FLAC or WAV, it's also far bigger than it needs to be: converting it to MP3 first shrinks it to a fraction of the size with no audible difference for spoken word.
For a book from the free library, it means the book is bigger than one Yoto card holds, and the app can't split those yet. See the file limits question for the full set of numbers.
Recording links expire after 7 days. In Little Vox, find the story and create a fresh link. It comes with all the details pre-filled, ready to send again. Easy.
We're a small team, which means when you email us, a real person reads it and writes back. No support ticket queue, no chatbot, no "have you tried turning it off and on again" auto-reply.
✉️ Email support@littlevox.pro