Audio Tour - Cell Phone Tours

Cell Phone Tours

A cell phone tour is an audio tour where pre-recorded or stream audio interpretation for a heritage site or a cultural exhibit is provided via a cell phone. Cell phone audio tours have the advantage that most visitors already have the equipment needed to take the audio tour, being their cell phones.

Each venue is assigned a phone number with appropriate stop numbers, displayed next the exhibit. Once a visitor has dialed in, they will be prompted and can enter the corresponding stop number of the exhibit they’re viewing, to hear the recorded content. These tours also enable the visitors to: fast forward, rewind, pause, as well as leave a feedback message for each exhibit or the whole tour; simply by pressing a number. In addition to audio content, some providers are also able to stream video, and text message recent visitors with updates. This is the old-style approach, not used widely.

Wikipedia allowed the emergence of a new generation of audio tours and location-based service (LBS) audio tours using the capabilities of smartphones like the iPhone. These audio tours rely on Wikipedia to benefit from a huge source of information (several hundreds thousands of locations around the world). The Wikipedia articles are read thanks to speech synthesis. In this manner, thousands hours of vocal explanations are available. One of such systems, based on patented technologies, were presented during the Wikimédia Conference 2010 in Paris at the National Assembly of France. Its predecessor was presented at World Travel Market in London in 2009.

Other examples of LBS audio tours that use the capabilities of smartphones include WalkExplorer or Guide@Hand