VoiceMap crossed a few milestones in 2023: 1,000 tours in March, for instance, then 500,000 app installs and 30,000 tour ratings a few months later. In total, our community of independent travellers and curious locals spent over 100,000 hours doing VoiceMap tours last year, and after all that time out and about, exploring, you had feedback – bug reports, sometimes, but also feature requests and helpful suggestions.
Version 11 of the VoiceMap app, which we’ve dubbed Kyoto, is a response to some of that feedback. It includes:
- Wishlisting, so that you can bookmark tours when you’re planning a regional trip or working through what’s available close to home. Your wishlist syncs across devices, in the app or on the web, using your VoiceMap account.
- An option to increase audio playback speeds by 1.25x, 1.5x and 2x. This is experimental, because we use Mapmaker to carefully match audio times with the travel times between locations, but runners in our community want to move 2x faster and that only works if the audio is also 2x faster.
- A redesigned library to help you sort between the tours you’ve wishlisted, or purchased, or downloaded so they’re ready to use offline.
You’ll also find new features on the web, all of them released over the last few weeks. Wishlisting works there too, for a start, and if you click on the heart icon to save a tour while browsing voicemap.me, you’ll immediately find it in the VoiceMap apps by going to Library and tapping on the “Wishlisted” filter.
We’ve added country pages to voicemap.me at last, like this one for the UK, where we have 221 tours across 53 destinations, or this one for the US, where we have 292 tours covering 96 destinations.
There’s more: the process of creating an account or signing in on the web is smoother now, and you’ll notice improvements to the tour detail screens, which more closely match the same screens in the apps. For publishers, there’s a new way to create tours, and this is the first improvement of many coming to the publisher dashboard over the next few weeks.
Version 11 of the app is available now from both the App Store and Google Play. It’s full of new features, but it’s also proof that we listen, so if you have feedback or a request of your own, get in touch.
A way to search for free tours within a location/region/ country/state/province,
PS I never looked how specific we must be. I would like to do by state if not already allowed:)
Noted Amy, thanks.
Feature request: please add “Return to last location” to the list of ways to resume the tour after pausing. That way, if you stopped to find a restroom and you are geographically closer to the end of the tour, you don’t have to miss a bunch of stops.
Thanks for the feedback Madeleine. This feature already exists, if I understand you correctly. I think we released it with version 10. When you end a tour before the final location and then resume it, you should have four options: the exact position you were at when you ended the tour and, after that, the three closest locations to where you are right now. If you ended the tour after 1 minute and 5 seconds of location 12’s audio, for example, the first option should start the tour from exactly 1 minute and 5 seconds of location 12.