What comes to mind when you hear the term “audio tour”? Years ago, when we asked this question in a survey, the answer wasn’t a surprise. Audio tours make people think of dusty museums, where grubby devices play dry facts when you push a button.
This misperception might be VoiceMap’s biggest challenge. The fastest way to change it is by getting somebody to listen to the audio from one of our tours. When they hear a voice talking to them – instead of at them – telling a story at ground level instead of 10,000 feet, their eyes light up. I’ve seen it over and over again. Music and sound effects help bring this type of personal storytelling to life, but it’s icing on the cake.
In Version 14 of the app, codenamed Valencia, we’ve added inline audio previews that get you to that moment faster, if you’re new to VoiceMap. If you’re a loyal user who stopped thinking about dusty museums long ago, then Version 14’s inline previews will make choosing your next tour easier. It’ll guide you to the best choice in other ways too, including:
- Granular reviews, with feedback on whether a tour has a strong sense of place, straightforward navigation, clear production quality, enough information, and an interesting route. These are based on the recipe for a perfect tour we share with all our publishers.
- Redesigned tour cards that display the publisher’s name clearly and give you access to our new inline previews with a single tap.
- Better destination maps displaying where tours start and end, plus the full route of the tour you have in focus. You can swipe through tours to find an option that perfectly matches your plans for the day, or work out how to string tours together – like Jo Eckhardt’s tours of Berlin, which connect in a single, ten-kilometre loop.
- A new Reviews tab, replacing the Comments tab. It matches ratings with comments and lets you sort by date or relevance.
VoiceMap’s tours have well over 50,000 ratings, with an overall average of 4.6 out of 5. We’re nearly eleven years old now – Version 1 of the app was released in June 2014 – but 20,000 of those ratings were left in the last 12 months, and they averaged 4.7 overall. I think it’s safe to say we aren’t gathering dust.
You can download version 14 of the VoiceMap app for iOS or Android by going to the Apple App Store or Google Play.