Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

VoiceMap published its 2,026th tour in the first week of 2026 – and that number has gone up almost every day since. Our latest additions open up the new destinations of Livigno and Cortina d'Ampezzo. There's a new option in Milan too, specifically about the Winter Olympics, so we're using that as the codename for Version 15 of the app. Welcome to VoiceMap Milan! Here's what you'll find: • 50 odd categories, from Architecture and Medieval History to Ghosts and Hauntings, Food and Drink, Crime and Mystery. Browse them on the home screen, use them to filter tours in a destination, or combine them with filters for distance and rating. Some categories span hundreds of tours. Others cover a handful – the kind of niche, personal tours that only a platform with nearly 800 publishers can offer. • Tour passes for a single destination, a whole country, or the entire VoiceMap catalogue. With passes, the cost per tour drops considerably, but every tour you choose stays in your library forever. • While our goal is to make following a tour so easy that you never really need to look at the map, from start to finish, we've now added numbered locations you can toggle on and off as you walk – especially when the app suspects you've gone off track and Ian McKellen chimes in with, "Not all who wander are lost, but it looks like you might be". • A rethought fallback start option that lets you begin a tour from anywhere along its route with numbered locations enabled by default. • Labels that indicate when a tour was produced with significant use of AI, whether that's for the script itself, the voiceover, or for translation. We hope VoiceMap as a whole stands for authentic, curiously human tours with insight from very real people, and it's because of this that we think it's important to note where a publisher has leaned on an AI tool.

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

In transit? Listen to podcasts by VoiceMap’s tour publishers when you’re at the airport, on a train or taking a roadtrip. A number of our most popular publishers are also podcasters with shows that build context around their audio tours, including: • Annie Sargent, who has eight self-guided tours of Paris, but also hosts Join Us in France, with over 500 episodes of tips • Mike Corradi, whose 22 VoiceMap tours are a perfect complement to his podcast chronicling the history of Italy from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to the present • Republic of Amsterdam Radio, which has an enlightening tour of the Red Light District as well as a show that follows “the incredible journey of the world’s most influential swamp” You’ll find podcasts listed under the publisher’s profile, where you can start listening or follow them to get notifications when they release a new episode.

In 14.1.2, VoiceMap's publishers will find something we've built just for them: an audio recorder that has your script in a teleprompter, ready to go. It also uploads your voiceover to Mapmaker automatically, so we can get to work on editing it. This version also includes a new language – Ukrainian. It's our 15th so far.

Updates, bug fixes and overall optimisation

What comes to mind when you hear the term “audio tour”? Years ago, when we asked this question in a survey, the answer wasn’t a surprise. Audio tours make people think of dusty museums, where grubby devices play dry facts when you push a button. This misperception might be VoiceMap’s biggest challenge. The fastest way to change it is by getting somebody to listen to the audio from one of our tours. When they hear a voice talking to them – instead of at them – telling a story at ground level instead of 10,000 feet, their eyes light up. I’ve seen it over and over again. Music and sound effects help bring this type of personal storytelling to life, but it’s icing on the cake. In Version 14 of the app, codenamed Valencia, we’ve added inline audio previews that get you to that moment faster, if you’re new to VoiceMap. If you’re a loyal user who stopped thinking about dusty museums long ago, then Version 14’s inline previews will make choosing your next tour easier. It’ll guide you to the best choice in other ways too, including: • Granular reviews, with feedback on whether a tour has a strong sense of place, straightforward navigation, clear production quality, enough information, and an interesting route. These are based on the recipe for a perfect tour we share with all our publishers. • Redesigned tour cards that display the publisher’s name clearly and give you access to our new inline previews with a single tap. • Better destination maps displaying where tours start and end, plus the full route of the tour you have in focus. You can swipe through tours to find an option that perfectly matches your plans for the day, or work out how to string tours together – like Jo Eckhardt’s tours of Berlin, which connect in a single, ten-kilometre loop. • A new Reviews tab, replacing the Comments tab. It matches ratings with comments and lets you sort by date or relevance. VoiceMap’s tours have well over 50,000 ratings, with an overall average of 4.6 out of 5. We’re nearly eleven years old now – Version 1 of the app was released in June 2014 – but 20,000 of those ratings were left in the last 12 months, and they averaged 4.7 overall. I think it’s safe to say we aren’t gathering dust.

Bug fixes and performance improvements

Bug fixes and performance improvements

Bug fixes and performance improvements

Bug fixes and performance improvements

Bug fixes and performance improvements

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 long, 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, this milestone highlights why we think you’ll find the new features in version 13 of the app, codenamed Pepys, 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. 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.

Bug fixes and performance improvements