Autio - Travel Companion 12+

This is an excellent app

I am a startup lawyer and I help a ton of app developers. I have pitched this exact app to a bunch of them because I wanted to see an app like this made. The teams all concluded the same thing: it would take a Herculean effort before any revenues would come. This would be a passion project more than a simple utility application. I believe that is correct but I think the team at here hear have found the right people who are passionate about learning and sharing because this app is excellent. The experience is great and the content is solid. This is a perfect application for someone who travels a lot and tends to have their nose buried in a guidebook or loves reading the plaques at historic sites. I’m so excited this app is here.

Could be better

Signed up for a year. This is the first app I have ever paid for and I am disappointed. Listened to several hundred stories over 3 weeks driving cross country and back. Don’t know exact count because I have had to delete and reinstall app several times and the count resets. The app is still freezing up and not working for me anymore.
The premise is great and 80%+ of the stories and most of the narrators (I never heard any of the marquee narrators) were enjoyable. However, I do not like WF Strong, who narrates most of the Texas stories. It is obvious he is full of himself and some of his stories are personal musings and not related to history or interesting places at all, e.g. “quotes from my brother.” He also ends every story with “…some of them are true.” Isn’t the whole point of this app true stories of history and interesting facts?
Additionally, I think the stories load to far in advance from their location. I found myself pausing the story and then starting it closer to its location on several occasions.

Developer Response ,

Hey there,

We’re delighted that you were able to listen to so many stories! You’re a story pro now, which makes your feedback all the more valuable. It’s really helpful as we curate and update our library of stories every week.
We find that some users notice a pause in stories when they lose cell phone service, which may explain some of these pauses. Rest assured that our dev team is working on an improved offline experience.

We’ll be sure to have our content team review some of the stories you mentioned to make sure our library remains true to our location-based promise. We’d love to know what else we can do to turn that 2 star review into 5!

Bryce

Inaccurate and with bugs

I’d love to give this a 5 star and review and maybe in time once the bugs are works out I will. However, the information on many “stories” is rather inaccurate. I will give one as example here. The story on East Stroudsburg, PA states it was originally named “Danville” when it was actually named “Dansbury”. Danville is a completely different town in PA. Also, you reference the historic train depot in East Stroudsburg which is a rather significant piece of their history. You also wrongly named that as the Pocono Depot I believe. The train depot is actually Dansbury Depot, always was and still is as it ran its last route through there in 1970. Some very large inaccuracies on this topic here.
Lastly, once you complete one story it automatically feeds into the next and you get “charged” for a second story which was not the intended.
Some large bugs and inaccuracies to work through before I can rate this higher. I give two stars because the idea of it is great, but it needs to be factual.

Developer Response ,

Dear MedJenn,
Thank you for giving our app a try and for all of the feedback on these stories. We'll look into these right away and make the appropriate changes.

We can also help you get stories deposited back into your account, just drop us an email to support@hearhere.com and one of our friendly team members will get back to you.

Thank you!