VoiceMap published its 2,026th tour in the first week of 2026 – and that number has gone up almost every day since. Two of our latest additions opened up Livigno and Cortina d’Ampezzo – both new destinations for us – just before the Winter Olympics. There’s a new tour in Milan too, specifically about the games, so we’re using that as the codename for Version 15 of the app.
Welcome to VoiceMap Milan. Here’s what you’ll find:
Screenshots from Version 15 of the VoiceMap app, displaying numbered locations, category filtering, and tour passes.
- Tour Passes, which let you buy a pass for a single destination, a whole country, or the entire VoiceMap catalogue. Passes bring the cost per tour down – especially if you choose an option with 10 or even 20 tours – but when you redeem a tour, it still stays in your library forever so you can listen to it as many times as you like. Passes are designed for weeklong stays in Paris, trips across Europe by train, frequent travellers, and curious locals, exploring close to home.
- 50 categories, from Architecture in London to Food and Drink in Paris to Ghosts and Hauntings in York and Crime and Mystery in New York. Some categories span hundreds of tours. Others, like Medical History or Christmas, only cover a handful, and help to surface the kind of niche, deeply personal tours that only a platform with nearly 800 publishers can offer.
- Location numbering that you can toggle on and off as you go. We do our best to make tours so easy to follow that you don’t need to look at the map, but that isn’t always practical. When the app suspects you’ve gone off-route, it offers to turn numbered locations on, with a gentle nudge from Sir Ian McKellen, saying “Not all who wander are lost, but it looks like you might be.”
- A rethought Force Start option. This used to mean beginning the tour a little further than normal from the recommended starting point. It now allows you to begin a tour from anywhere along its route, with numbered locations displayed by default so you always know where you are.
- Labels that indicate when a tour was produced with significant use of AI, broken down into script, voice, or translation. At VoiceMap, we believe in authentic, curiously human tours with insight from very real people. It’s because of this that we think it’s important to note where a publisher has leaned on an AI tool.
You’ll also notice improvements to the home screen, with shelves for tours in a specific category, new tours, popular tours, and publishers with podcasts. If you haven’t explored podcasts in the app yet, it’s worth a look – Annie Sargent’s Join Us in France, Felicity Hughes’ The Making of Madrid, and Mike Corradi’s A History of Italy are all available to stream or download without leaving VoiceMap, and they’re the perfect thing to listen to on planes, trains or taxis, when you’re travelling to your next tour.
If you’re curious about the title of this blog post, our Instagram Reel showing a few highlights from the walking tour of London’s Theatreland, narrated by Ian McKellen, should serve as an explanation.
