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Comment by audiala | Hacker News Reader

I have built https://audiala.com which creates audioguides for historical and touristic places in cities all over the world. It brings a bit over $500/month in in-app purchases.

I got the idea in 2023 as I was solo traveling Florence, Italy and thought it would be much nicer to listen to stories about the monuments around me instead of having to read a guide. There is also so much more to be done: next, my plan is to create personalised itineraries based on your preferences, starting point, etc.

I tried paid marketing but found much more effective the SEO I have done on the website, and users seem to share with their friends and come back, which makes me happy.

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Super cool! I had a very similar idea recently: I wanted to have on-demand podcasts about one's surroundings as you explore a new place (also taking into account a small list of user interests). I did a prototype [1] with the OpenAI APIs but the generated results were too shallow and not as interesting. It seems you prepared it with more carefully curated content, smart. My city is covered by Audiala, will give it a try!

[1] https://github.com/geonnave/roadcast

Nice, I will check your solution too. I would also love to have NotebookLM available via API, it could be nice to generate podcast-like guides.

Cool I had this idea about 10 years ago. I was walking around a city alone with headphones on while Google maps told me how to get to my destination. Thought how nice it would be to combine gps and audio to let me explore and learn. Glad to see someone executing on it!

Yes, it's definitely a cool project! Sometimes it's hard to stop reading and listening at all there is to learn and instead code... I hope to have the itineraries with directions done by end of January.

Will definitely check this out. Our go-to guide whenever travelling Europe has always been Rick Steve's books and audio guide app. Those are like having a personal guide with you as he will tell cool things like "take few steps to the left, now the point you are standing is where Hitler stood and made a painting of this church (in Vienna)" or "Leonardo da Vinci used to stare at this artistic metal door for inspiration (in Florence)". Those audio tours are one of the most fun things we remember from our trips as he is a great storyteller.

Thanks for sharing. This type of storytelling is what I want to achieve, even if I am not there yet. But I am confident this is achievable already.

How is the content created and curated?

It’s a RAG pipeline based on content from wikipedia and relevant websites. Getting the list of relevant places might the trickiest part of the pipeline but for this I settled with a not-perfect solution where users can manually request missing places.

Interesting - how heavily are you utilizing AI generated content? Pages like this for example: https://audiala.com/en/germany

We rely on AI for most of the content and correct if mistakes are spotted, but they seem quite rare. 99% of the content is directly coming from our AI pipeline.

I just noticed that you run https://allaboutberlin.com. My first website was https://toutsurprague.fr in 2008, similar ideas :)

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