Milestones – VoiceMap Blog

Follow destinations, publishers and your feet with VoiceMap Pepys

We published our 100th tour in London a few days ago. VoiceMap now covers close to 3,500 locations there, spread across intersecting routes over 250 kilometres long – or 165 miles, if you prefer.

In total, we now have roughly three days of audio about this one destination. When you consider that VoiceMap has grown to offer tours in 450 other destinations, you’ll probably agree that the new features in version 13 of the app, codenamed Pepys, are particularly useful.

With VoiceMap Pepys, you can:

Follow destinations and get a push notification or an email when there’s a new tour in London, Ljubljana, Los Angeles or the Liwa Oasis.
Follow your favourite publishers – from history teacher Sam Brearley, who published our 100th tour in London, to Context Travel, which has tours in 15 countries by an incredible network of destination experts.
Subscribe to our newsletter “Senses of Direction”, which celebrates curiosity and the human connections that make travel meaningful.
Get push notifications to help you save battery if you stop to get a drink, grab a meal or take in a panoramic view while you’re out doing a tour.

Why Pepys? We normally give app releases destination names, but we used London for version 5, back in 2019 when we had 50 tours there.

Some previews of version 13, showing the options to follow destinations and publishers as well as a sample notification

Samuel Pepys was a diarist who chronicled London before and after the Great Fire of 1666. His personal recollections about ordinary life – along with art, plagues, politics and war – are still considered one of the best guides to the city.

Pepys’ diary entries add up to over one million words. VoiceMap’s London tours come in at a little under 650,000, so we’ve got some work to do. Pepys is also a reminder that the personal perspectives behind all our tours – shared by nearly 800 publishers from all walks of life – are at least as important as our growing list of destinations.

You can download version 13 of the VoiceMap app for iOS or Android by going to the Apple App Store or Google Play.

VoiceMap is ten

VoiceMap turned ten this month. Ten years is a milestone worth celebrating, but it also invites an uncomfortable question. Are we still a startup?

I’ll start with what I think is the most straightforward answer. In the last twelve months, we’ve paid out more royalties than we did over the previous nine years combined. If a startup is a company with a business model that works best at scale, and most of its growth still ahead of it, VoiceMap is definitely a startup.

Other metrics bear this out, from what has been a busy start to 2024:

We released version 11 of the VoiceMap app, with wishlisting, adjustable playback speeds and a redesigned library.
We published 90 tours in ten weeks. Our first 90 tours took almost 80 weeks.
We added new distribution channels, including Klook and direct listings with Google Things To Do. This is on top of what is already the widest and most flexible range of distribution options available for self-guided tours.

Hello Kyoto: What’s new in version 11 of the VoiceMap app

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:

Announcing VoiceMap Athens: What’s new in version 10 of the best* audio tour app

VoiceMap is at its best when you’re immersed in new surroundings, with your screen off, because the serendipity of GPS playback can seem like magic. But version 10, codenamed Athens**, is about what you’re doing when your screen is on, especially if you’re looking at your tour’s map.

Improvements in VoiceMap Athens include:

1,000 VoiceMap tours – and other rewards for craft, consistency and putting things in context

We reached an important milestone last Friday: 1,000 published tours. Friday was also our ninth birthday, coincidentally – but also usefully, because it reminded us that this took some doing.

Our tours now cover some 30,000 locations in well over 300 destinations, and our scripts add up to a fraction under 5.5 million words. If you started listening to all of our audio now, beginning with a Chao Phraya ferry ride published in June 2014, you’d still be listening halfway through March, more than 600 hours later.

10,000 tour ratings and other recent milestones

VoiceMap reached a few milestones this month: we published our 800th tour, then we extended our reach to 60 countries with our first walk in Belgium, and yesterday we reached a total of 10,000 ratings across all the tours on the platform.

It took us a full 39 months to get to 2,000 ratings, and 20 more to get to 4,000. Reaching 6,000 took another year, and we reached 8,000 nine months after that, over a period that included the lockdowns of April, May and June last year. The final increment, bringing us to 10,000, took just four months. That’s basically ten times faster than the slow climb to our first 2,000 ratings.