Speak your ideas. Hold your book.

Credits are how Vellu meters AI usage inside the app. Recording into Vellu is free, and so are the AI summaries and auto-tagging of your recordings. Credits go to the rest of the AI work: transcription — turning your recordings into text (1 credit per minute of audio), chapter writing, rewrites, proofreading, and image generation. Every operation shows its exact credit cost before you confirm it — and the full per-operation price list is on the pricing page. A full book typically takes anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of thousand credits depending on length, audio volume, and how often you regenerate. Those credits produce the book itself; if you want to hold it in your hands, a printed copy is ordered separately for a one-time price in euros — softcover from €49.95, hardcover from €69.95, delivered to you (see printed books). The exception: with a book bundle (The Keepsake or The Legacy Edition), a voucher for one standard printed copy is already included in the bundle price, so there's no separate print charge. You can also download it as an EPUB, PDF, or Word e-book at no extra cost.

You don't. The built-in microphone in your smartphone or laptop is plenty for Vellu — modern device mics are accurate and work reliably with our transcription. A separate microphone is only worth getting if you're using a device that doesn't have one of its own — a desktop computer, for example. A quiet room and a sensible speaking distance affect the result more than the microphone itself.

Vellu runs directly in the browser with nothing to install — on a smartphone, a tablet (including Safari on an iPad), or a computer; the supported browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. Recording works beautifully on a phone with its built-in microphone, right at the coffee table. For putting the book together, though, we recommend a computer: some tools, such as the cover designer and planning across several chapters, are at their best on a larger screen. The same account works on every device, so you can record on your phone and pick up the same book on your computer.

Yes. This is one of the most common ways people make a book with Vellu. A book can be made entirely on the storyteller's behalf: you create the project, record or upload the audio, edit the chapters, and order the printed copy — the storyteller only has to talk. Or you can do it together: an elderly parent or grandparent tells the stories while a child or grandchild handles the device. When you interview your loved one, keep your own questions short and let them do most of the talking — transcription doesn't separate speakers, so this keeps the text clearest. For practical tips on the helper's role, see our guide to making a book for someone else.

You can — but good to know: transcription doesn't currently separate the voices within a recording, so the whole conversation comes out as a single stream of text. Interviews still work well when the storyteller does most of the talking and the interviewer keeps their own remarks short. Mark the main speaker on each recording, and tidy any mixed passages directly in the editable transcript — many books are made exactly this way, by interviewing a parent or grandparent.

Yes — with one honest caveat: a strong dialect can occasionally produce small inaccuracies in the transcript. In practice the text stays close enough to what was said that the book doesn't suffer — the AI that writes the chapters is excellent at working even with an imperfect transcript. It's worth double-checking direct quotations when you review the chapters; fixing them is easy, since both the transcript and the chapters are fully editable. The surest way to know is to try it with your own speech: signing up gets you 100 free credits, no card required.

Vellu's AI builds your book from audio. The natural way to use written material is to tell its contents aloud in your own words, or read passages into a recording — which also turns even dry documents into livelier storytelling. You can also write or paste text directly into chapters in the editor.

Yes — your own photographs are the heart of many books. You can upload photos and drawings (JPEG, PNG, GIF, or WebP, up to 10 MB each) straight into chapters, and the cover designer lets you use your own image on the cover as well. Adding your own pictures costs no credits. AI illustration is an optional extra — a whole book can perfectly well be illustrated with nothing but your own photos.

It depends entirely on you — how much you have to say, how much you record at once, and how carefully you review the result. There's no fixed number of hours. What we can say is that Vellu is dramatically faster than writing a manuscript from scratch: it's possible to produce several finished chapters in under an hour. We recommend spending more time reviewing and polishing than generating.

Yes. You can order your finished book as a professionally printed softcover or hardcover directly inside Vellu — produced on demand and delivered across the EU/EEA. Softcover starts at €49.95 and hardcover at €69.95 (VAT included), with free standard delivery; you'll see the exact price, including any length or colour options, before you pay. A single order covers up to 25 copies — for a larger print run, such as an association's anniversary book, you can place several orders or contact our support at hello@vellu.ai — we usually reply within one business day. You can still export as PDF, EPUB, or Word if you'd rather use another print service.

You choose. Vellu has a body-text size setting with four levels: Compact (about 10 pt), Standard (about 11 pt — the default, an ordinary book size), Comfort (about 13 pt, easy with reading glasses), and Large print (about 16 pt, the recognised large-print threshold for low vision and ageing eyes). The size applies everywhere at once — the printed interior, the e-book PDF, and the editor preview — so what you read while editing is exactly what prints. One honest trade-off: larger type means more pages, so a book near the 150-page limit covered by a bundle's print voucher can tip over it and add a small per-page surcharge at print time. You can change the size and preview the result any time before you order.

They stay yours. Your data is hosted in the EEA (AWS Europe region). Transcription runs on OpenAI's Whisper and text generation on Anthropic's Claude, protected by EU standard contractual clauses — and neither uses your material to train AI models. Nothing you record or write is used for AI training. Your recordings and texts are kept until you delete them, and deleting your account removes your data within 30 days. The full privacy policy, including the list of sub-processors, is at ink.vellu.ai/privacy.

Under EU and Finnish law, only a human can hold copyright — neither Vellu nor the AI providers we use have any claim to your book, and our Terms of Service confirm we make no ownership claim either. Whether your finished prose is also protected against third parties depends on how much of it reflects your own creative choices: dictating your story, shaping the structure, choosing the creativity setting, and editing the AI output all strengthen that protection. Books produced at high creativity settings with little user editing may have weaker — or no — copyright in the AI-written prose itself, though the underlying recordings, ideas, and structure remain unambiguously yours. The law here is still evolving, so the safest path is to stay actively involved in shaping and editing the result. For a fuller explanation, see our guide on who owns an AI-written book.

Vellu is primarily designed for personal projects — memoirs, family histories, captured expertise — but our Terms of Service do not prevent commercial use. You're free to publish and sell books you produce with Vellu. Because copyright over AI-assisted text is still legally unsettled in many countries, the practical responsibility for ensuring your book is publishable in your market sits with you. The recordings and the ideas in them are unambiguously yours.

Only audio you own or have permission to use. Vellu's Terms of Service require that you have the right to all recordings you upload — so your own interviews, lectures, and personal conversations are fine, but you can't feed in third-party podcasts, audiobooks, copyrighted music, or anything you don't have permission to use. If you're recording a conversation with someone else, make sure they're aware and consent.