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Comment by StephenCanis | Hacker News Reader

Problem: My experience taking audio tours at various museums showed the use of antiquated and expensive hardware. Most alternate solutions used mobile apps which are inconvenient to download and take more time to release.

Project: I went about developing a web app that allows anyone to quickly create an audio tour for free:

https://www.youraudiotour.com/create

I also integrated Amazon Polly to automatically generate audio based on text inputs. This further increases ease of use by eliminating the need to record and edit audio.

It was a great learning experience since I learned rails from scratch and don't have a background in programming. Now to see if I can get more people to use it!

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I like this idea but extending it to the whole world based on geolocation. Use an app and earphones to find voice/text descriptions of places and landmarks, monuments, sculptures, buildings, etc. Everything can be geo-toured.

Of course in a museum is perfect but based on geolocation it doesn't have to be linear, you can go anywhere in the museum and get voice/text about that particular place/masterpiece and when they are changed then easily change the audio/text for the place.

Love it!

Really cool idea, I think people would love that! The biggest hurdle would be getting enough interesting content. You would almost need to create a Wikipedia for real world locations.

If you were able to get enough content I think that would be an incredible app/service.

> You would almost need to create a Wikipedia for real world locations.

Exactly. Wonderful service with world wide use and translatable to all languages. You definitely would need "curators" for every place and at the beginning let people add their own transcripts in order to build a huge database.

I'm doing something similar for local news/events, called SeeAround.me, where people can see/submit local news stories and their locations. But I could see sort of a cross between that and Your Audio Tour as particular interesting for people who want to do their own walking tours, for example.

I already made that for a client. Don't think users will write stories from their mobile, at least good ones. It was difficult to start with no content, too similar to twitter.

I find that's the trouble with alot of good ideas I have. They work great if you can get to scale but that's easier said then done!

Is your site still up? I would be interested to see it.

Nice! Check out https://www.detour.com/, similar platform primarily focused on city-level audio walking tours.

Cool, thanks for the link! Looks like a great way to explore new cities.

I'm hoping my site will be more helpful for smaller, less tech savvy, organisations who want to create their own tours. Many of these sites create tours in house or charge a pretty penny to create your own app.

Nice! I'll be passing this along to my museum friends. I could see this being especially useful for smaller museums that may not have the budget to buy a full application or edit the audio. Do you think you'll still keep the custom-audio option, or only Amazon Polly?

Thanks! Appreciate the kind words. The target was definitely for smaller museums that lack the time and budget for a full tour. I noticed a lot of these museums don't have audio tours which I think is a shame.

I actually had the options to include custom audio and record audio in the browser. I took them out to simplify the product but I would definitely consider re-implementing them if there was demand.

You should check out guide from Casa Batllo in Barcelona. Definitely the best one I have seen so far https://www.casabatllo.es/en/visit/videoguide/

This is awesome! Would be interesting to add BLE Beacon support for autoplay when you walk up to a specific area on the tour.

Thanks! Ya there are a ton a features I think you could add to this - beacon and location support would be very cool.

Great idea! Would it be implementable with Google Project Tango? Currently working on an idea with museums, and they don't want to handle any installations (i.e. beacons)

At the moment I haven't considered how I would implement that feature. First I want to see if I can get people to use the basic version.

Do you have a website? If so you should share it, would be interesting to see what you're doing.

I see:) We are in the same boat, too early even for a website! Will share an update once we have some progress!

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