About Our Technology
This is not "just AI"
Anyone can paste a prompt into ChatGPT and get a poem. It'll rhyme "heart" with "start," squeeze in some clichés, and call it done. We built something fundamentally different.
The Problem with AI Poetry
Large language models are extraordinary at many things. Poetry is not one of them. Ask any AI to write a poem and you'll hit the same walls every time:
They can't count syllables
LLMs process tokens, not sounds. They literally cannot hear the words they're writing. Ask for a haiku and you'll get 5-8-4 instead of 5-7-5 — they're guessing.
They default to cliché rhymes
Love/above. Heart/start. Day/way. Without real phonetic awareness, AI reaches for the same tired pairings that make poems sound like greeting cards.
They don't hear sound textures
Great poetry uses vowel echoes, consonant patterns, and stress rhythms that create a feeling beyond meaning. AI doesn't know how words sound together — only what they mean.
We gave our AI poet ears
Before our AI writes a single line, we run every meaningful word from your contributors' stories through a proprietary phonetic analysis engine. The result: a complete sound profile that gives the AI something no other poetry tool has — actual awareness of how words sound.
Real Rhyme Intelligence
We don't let the AI guess at rhymes. Our engine pre-computes both perfect rhymes and slant rhymes for every key word in the contributors' stories. The AI gets a curated palette of sound-pairings drawn directly from the memories people shared — so rhymes feel discovered, not forced.
Slant rhymes (like "home" and "stone," or "grief" and "leaf") are what separate sophisticated poetry from sing-song verse. Our poet knows exactly which near-matches are available and uses them to create a more natural, literary sound.
Syllable-Perfect Meter
Our engine analyzes every word's pronunciation — how many syllables it has, where the stress falls, what metrical foot it forms. The AI sees each word's rhythmic shape before choosing where to place it.
The difference: when our AI writes "adventure," it knows it's three syllables with stress on the second beat (an iamb). It knows "beautiful" leads with a stressed syllable (a dactyl). This means lines actually scan — they have the natural rise and fall that makes poetry feel musical when read aloud.
Sound-Texture Mapping
Beyond rhyme and meter, we analyze vowel sounds across all the words from your stories and group them by their stressed vowel. This reveals clusters of words that resonate together — words that share a sonic quality even when they don't rhyme.
When the AI can see that "light," "time," "smile," and "bright" all share the same vowel sound, it can sustain that sonic thread across a stanza — creating the kind of vowel harmony that gives great poetry its texture. This is the technique poets call assonance, and our AI does it deliberately, not by accident.
The Result
Generic AI Poem
- Predictable "moon/June" rhymes
- Inconsistent syllable counts
- Sounds like a greeting card
- Could be about anyone
- Read once, forgotten
Collabraverse Poem
- Unexpected, satisfying rhymes drawn from real stories
- Lines that scan with natural rhythm
- Vowel textures that make stanzas resonate
- Impossible to write about anyone else
- Read aloud, framed, kept forever
Still Rooted in Real Stories
All of this phonetic intelligence serves a single purpose: making the human stories shine. The memories your contributors share are the soul of the poem. Our technology doesn't replace that — it gives the AI the craft to honor those stories with poetry that sounds like it was written by someone who truly listened.
Because the best gift isn't perfect technology. It's proof that people showed up for you — woven into something you'll want to read aloud.
See It for Yourself
Browse real examples of what our AI poet creates from real stories.