Tokovo

Tokovo is an AI-native studio for multi-device shows that happen inside phones.

Create cinematic chat dramas, social-feed stories, screen-recorded episodes, and short-form series without rebuilding phone screens in After Effects. Tokovo gives AI and creators a full phone-native production stage: one or many simulated devices, app worlds, OS surfaces, camera direction, sound, voice, backgrounds, overlays, and deterministic rendering.

Current product priority: create and publish excellent episodes through checked-in TypeScript and LLM-assisted code authoring. The visual-editor experiment and its Studio-specific packages were deleted. See docs/STUDIO.md.

Watch the demo clip

What Tokovo Does

Tokovo turns a phone-native story into a repeatable production pipeline:

1. Generate or write a script, characters, tone, and episode arc.
2. Place the action inside one or many simulated devices: chats, feeds, DMs, notifications, calls, lockscreens, and screen recordings.
3. Direct pacing, camera moves, captions, keyboard input, sound, voice, and cliffhangers.
4. Preview the episode in browser.
5. Render a vertical MP4 for Shorts, Reels, TikTok, and serialized story formats.

The public repo exposes the engine behind that studio: TypeScript episode definitions, app simulators, device systems, render orchestration, validation, and showcase assets.

Why It Exists

Phone-native stories are already a format. People watch drama, comedy, product narratives, and social arcs through chats, feeds, DMs, screenshots, and recordings. Production is still too manual: screen recording, editing layers, recreating messages, nudging timelines, and fixing every variant by hand.

AI can now generate scripts, branches, edits, translations, captions, and variations. Tokovo gives that AI a controlled studio instead of a blank video canvas:

• generate one episode concept and render many platform-ready cuts
• stage one phone, split-screen phones, or multi-device narrative beats in the same episode
• direct the phone OS, app state, camera, sound, voice, and timing as structured data
• keep every story beat and render artifact reviewable
• ship repeatable series instead of one-off timeline projects
• avoid manual After Effects work for phone-screen stories

What You Can Make

Tokovo is a production engine for stories where the phone is the stage:

See What Tokovo Can Make for the complete format catalog and examples.

Multilingual production

Tokovo can adapt story copy, RTL direction, keyboard script, typography, app/system chrome, voice, timing, and camera framing for regional editions. Current implementation depth is package-specific: device system surfaces cover English, Hindi, Arabic, and Japanese; X covers English, Arabic RTL, and Hindi; WhatsApp covers English and Arabic RTL. Every advertised language/app combination still requires visual review.

Production surface

Tokovo’s current release surface covers:

Render The Showcase

Start with the multi-device social showcase:

EPISODE_ID=social-launch-multi-device pnpm --filter video-runner render:fast

The render writes an MP4 and manifest under apps/video-runner/out/. render:fast builds its workspace dependencies first so the MP4 cannot silently use stale package output. Set TOKOVO_SKIP_WORKSPACE_BUILD=1 only when those dependencies were already built from the current source tree.

Then try app-specific showcases:

EPISODE_ID=whatsapp-interaction-matrix-v3 pnpm --filter video-runner render:fast
EPISODE_ID=instagram-flagship-v2 pnpm --filter video-runner render:fast
EPISODE_ID=x-cinematic-flagship pnpm --filter video-runner render:fast
EPISODE_ID=typewriter-flagship-v2 pnpm --filter video-runner render:fast

First 10 Minutes

mise install
mise exec -- pnpm install
mise exec -- pnpm validate
EPISODE_ID=v2-creator-series-showcase mise exec -- pnpm --filter video-runner render:fast

For interactive preview:

pnpm --filter video-runner dev

Local Development

Requirements:

• mise
• the exact Node.js and pnpm versions pinned in .mise.toml

Install the toolchain and dependencies:

mise install
mise exec -- pnpm install

Activate mise in your interactive shell to use the shorter pnpm ... commands below. In CI and other non-interactive shells, keep the explicit mise exec -- prefix.

Open the main development surfaces:

pnpm dev

Preview only the renderer:

pnpm --filter video-runner dev

Showcase Episodes

These are good first renders when checking the current release surface:

The full showcase matrix is documented in apps/docs/app/showcase/page.mdx.

Repo Map

Authoring Flow

1. Create a *.episode.ts file in packages/episodes/src.
2. Define metadata with defineEpisode.
3. Build the timeline with the code-first episode builder.
4. Register the episode in the release or showcase catalog.
5. Validate with pnpm validate.
6. Preview in video-runner.
7. Render with pnpm --filter video-runner render:fast.

Release Gate

The canonical release gate is:

pnpm verify:release

For focused local work, these are the checks most contributors will use:

pnpm lint:ox
pnpm lint:release
pnpm -s typecheck:solution
pnpm validate
pnpm --filter @tokovo/episodes test
pnpm --filter video-runner typecheck
pnpm --filter docs build

Documentation

• docs/README.md is the canonical engineering-documentation index.
• docs/ENGINEERING_HANDBOOK.md is the complete current architecture and product handbook.
• docs/CAMERA.md, docs/WHATSAPP.md, docs/X.md, and docs/PLATFORM_VISUALS.md are the specialist architecture references.
• docs/RENDERING.md, docs/STUDIO.md, and docs/OPERATIONS.md own rendering, product scope, and operations.
• apps/docs/app/page.mdx is the documentation home.
• llms.txt, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and .skills/tokovo-authoring/SKILL.md provide LLM and coding-agent context.
• apps/docs/app/showcase/page.mdx lists the current showcase surface.
• apps/docs/app/getting-started/quickstart/page.mdx is the fastest render path.
• apps/docs/app/getting-started/first-episode/page.mdx explains the authoring shape.
• apps/docs/app/guides/object-storage-assets/page.mdx explains local and object-storage assets.
• ASSET_LICENSES.md records bundled asset provenance.

Run the docs site locally:

pnpm --filter docs dev

Release Standard

The public release bar is intentionally strict:

• app simulators must own their reducers, views, subjects, and DSL helpers
• episodes must validate before they are rendered
• multi-device episodes should author device focus intentionally
• camera targets should resolve to semantic subjects instead of fallback boxes
• audio cues, generated sounds, voice tracks, and backgrounds should be declared as episode data
• docs assets must be intentional, licensed, and listed in ASSET_LICENSES.md
• generated renders stay out of git unless they are part of the docs showcase

Contributing

Start with CONTRIBUTING.md, keep changes scoped, and run the relevant checks before opening a pull request.

For security issues, follow SECURITY.md instead of opening a public issue.

License

Tokovo is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE.