VoiceMap: Audio Tours & Guides

I took The Guilded Age Tour last week. What an enlightening self-guided tour through the elite and exclusive world of the late 1800’s - 1900’s! I’ve done other TellBetter Tours around NYC, and this is another that did not disappoint. Having walked past some of these mysterious millionaire’s mansions before, I had no idea of their amazing histories. It fills in the gaps of how the elite lived back in the day, and more importantly … how they got there - often by wicked ways. And the tour often bridges history to present day, pointing out some of the current or recent elites now owning them. It’s told with humorous anecdotes which creates a living history tour - not a musty museum version. The convincing character voices, music and sound effects and realistic audio production makes this tour convincing and realistic - the closest thing to stepping back in time. Do it!

Let me to start off by saying that functionality wise, this is a very exciting app. The audio synced to location works well and it’s an exciting way to explore a city on your own if you don’t wish to do an organized group walking tour. The tours I took through this app in Granada, Spain completely enhanced my trip to the city taking me to places I wouldn’t go on my own and giving me a ton of great information in the history of the city. That said, I found that the tours for other cities I used the app in (Seville and Madrid) were much less successful. This app runs on free lance content and it’s missing a lot of basic walking tours for popular tourist cities, and some of the tours it does offer for those cities are too niche to be appealing for most users. Hopefully this will change in the future if the app continues to attract creators but right now it’s missing some key content.

I've followed a couple of tours and found their content to be good. The app itself is easy to use on the whole, but I wish you could open up the directions to the starting point in Google Maps as I don't have Apple Maps installed on my phone. Some indication of the cardinal direction to the starting point (if navigating without using a map) would also be appreciated (e.g. "30 yards to the north" rather than just "30 yards away"). And this is quite minor, but I don't need to receive the whole "You've paused the tour. To resume..." spiel every time I pause. Once when you first use the app or even once every day or tour would probably be sufficient to remind most people. Lastly, there seems to be a minor bug with the download status where it shows the last map segment (I think it was the map) as not having completely downloaded until I restart the app. That happened for both tours I downloaded.