How to create your own audio guided tour?

As a professional tour guide, I was wondering how to offer an alternative product to my personal live tours. I was thinking of creating my audio tour guides, which would be available to download on my website, but the disadvantage of these was that I would need to create as well a map, but this would not be interactive and all this stuff would not be worth the job. So, I decided not to do so. Then came an instant idea of developing my own app for tour guides, which I immediately gave up, because I am not the type of person for this job. I am not interested, as so many of my other guide colleagues, in developing my own application or setting SEO or paying advertisements, etc. I just want to bury my nose into the history and the architecture of my favorite places and research all the information available about these and let these organizational things up to someone else.

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I looked for a tour app, which would let me create audio tour guides in an easy way and at a low cost. (link: Review of the best audio guide systems and apps for travel and tourism professionals). And I have decided to use the SmartGuide application as a truly useful app for tour guides as well as apps for tourists!

SmartGuide gives you the possibility to create your own audio tour guides, by using a very intuitive and quite simple CMS (Content Management System), where you can add and edit all the stuff really efficiently and quickly. The way how to create an audio tour with its own content was never easier and probably as valuable as before. Even big travel companies and destinations started to understand - they are already using this tour app instead of their audio tour guides devices.

The idea I like as well is that I can offer my audio tour guides for free or even sell them. I decided to offer them as an alternative to my regular live tours. But I can do the topics, which are not in the center of mainstream interest or the audio tour guides in the languages I do not speak and hit this way even more potential clients.

Thanks to this tour app I can create my own destination (in case this has not been created yet) and its attractive POIs. (If you are curious what POI means then let me explain to you that it is actually an abbreviation of point of interest.) And I can decide what really this point could be - it can cover Baroque church as well as my favorite café, or just a nice place to take a picture from. If someone is not really into creating these POIs, he can use the already existing ones and just enrich them or edit them as he would like them to be – change the texts or upload different pictures.

These spots you then connect into the tour and voilà mission completed! … Well, the best part is still about to come… that audio guide! After completing all the stuff and submitting the tour to be published the SmartGuide content team generates, due to TTS (text-to-speech) technology, the audio tour guides! And honestly said, I was really impressed by its high quality and the quite natural sound of the voice. But SmartGuide offers actually a little bit more even in the phase of the process. You can, after contacting the SmartGuide content team, use your own voice or the voice of a professional native speaker, which makes your tour more personal and outstanding than the others.

I am really happy to start to cooperate with SmartGuide and use the audio tour guides made in our cooperation as an alternative product to target the new segment of my clients.

Ready to bring your travel content to life? Create a digital audio guide with SmartGuide now! 

More articles about post-covid recovery through digital guiding technology:

1. How to replace hardware audio guide systems with a mobile tour app?
2. The best digital tools for DMOs, tourist attractions, and travel service providers in 2020!
3. How a tour guide app benefits Sutjeska National Park during COVID-19 recovery
4. Case study: Replacing the audio guide system onboard the Big Hop On Hop Off Bus in Prague
5. Paper versus pixels: What makes the best travel guide?