It doesn't really work. I tried my website and it shows up, while definitely being built after 2023. There is a mistake in the metadata of the page that shows it as from 2011.
What is the current state of the art for open source multilingual TTS? I have found Kokoro to be great as English as well, but am still searching for a good solution for French, Japanese, German...
I have built https://audiala.com which creates audioguides for historical and touristic places in cities all over the world. It brings a bit over $500/month in in-app purchases.
I got the idea in 2023 as I was solo traveling Florence, Italy and thought it would be much nicer to listen to stories about the monuments around me instead of having to read a guide. There is also so much more to be done: next, my plan is to create personalised itineraries based on your preferences, starting point, etc.
I tried paid marketing but found much more effective the SEO I have done on the website, and users seem to share with their friends and come back, which makes me happy.
Super cool! I had a very similar idea recently: I wanted to have on-demand podcasts about one's surroundings as you explore a new place (also taking into account a small list of user interests). I did a prototype [1] with the OpenAI APIs but the generated results were too shallow and not as interesting. It seems you prepared it with more carefully curated content, smart. My city is covered by Audiala, will give it a try!
Cool I had this idea about 10 years ago. I was walking around a city alone with headphones on while Google maps told me how to get to my destination. Thought how nice it would be to combine gps and audio to let me explore and learn. Glad to see someone executing on it!
Yes, it's definitely a cool project! Sometimes it's hard to stop reading and listening at all there is to learn and instead code... I hope to have the itineraries with directions done by end of January.
Will definitely check this out. Our go-to guide whenever travelling Europe has always been Rick Steve's books and audio guide app. Those are like having a personal guide with you as he will tell cool things like "take few steps to the left, now the point you are standing is where Hitler stood and made a painting of this church (in Vienna)" or "Leonardo da Vinci used to stare at this artistic metal door for inspiration (in Florence)". Those audio tours are one of the most fun things we remember from our trips as he is a great storyteller.
It’s a RAG pipeline based on content from wikipedia and relevant websites. Getting the list of relevant places might the trickiest part of the pipeline but for this I settled with a not-perfect solution where users can manually request missing places.
We rely on AI for most of the content and correct if mistakes are spotted, but they seem quite rare. 99% of the content is directly coming from our AI pipeline.
It's far from being perfect yet, sometimes too shallow and lacking a guiding thread, but after few iterations we believe it should offer all the information a visitor might need when planning a visit.
I suppose that the fact that it's too shallow could be improved by applying this approach recursively on each sub-topic, then synthesise them and create a narrative around them.
Indeed, but as you increase the complexity, you increase the chance of failure, and increase the costs as well, even if those are quite minimal in comparison with the time a human would have to spend on this to do that manually.
I like the idea but it's "hallucinating" a lot. An example that I often use is to search for a building not too well know in a small city. If the information (such as architect, building date) is online, but the content generated is wrong, it fails my test.
I built Audiala [1][2][3], which is a platform that creates virtual tour guides that goes with you anywhere in the world. While the content is mostly static now, the pipeline is there to make it entirely personal for each user, once I figured out how to deal with the API costs.
The next steps are to adapt the content based on realtime user feedback or queries like "What happened on this street during the French Revolution?" or "Tell me more about this building’s history." as well as offering step by step itinerary suggestions.
I believe it's now possible to build an Augmented Reality solution, where you leave your phone in your pocket, put some airpods and you listen or converse with your personal tour guide and fully immerse yourself in history.
Thanks, I like the design of your site better than the other alternatives I found and it came exactly when I needed it. As other have mentioned, a way to run it locally would be great to not have to deploy live or create a tunnel in order to test it.
https://audiala.com/changelog