Field guides for
museums building
better tours.
Seven guides, written for curators and visitor-experience leads who want to understand the category before evaluating vendors.
AI audio guides
What an AI audio guide actually is, how the category works, and whether it fits your museum.
READ THE GUIDEBuying & cost
What a museum audio guide actually costs in 2026 — and how to choose a vendor without getting sold.
READ THE GUIDEAudio guide pricing models compared: per-visitor, subscription, hardware, and free.
The four pricing shapes museums actually see in the audio-guide market — per-visitor, flat subscription, hardware rental plus content, and philanthropy-funded free — with honest tradeoffs and which one fits which institution.
10 MIN READ·READWhat to put in a museum audio guide RFP.
A working RFP framework for museum audio guide procurement — sections, question wording, and the security, accessibility, and SLA clauses that separate a defensible SaaS platform from a hardware vendor in disguise.
11 MIN READ·READThe hidden costs of traditional audio guide production.
The line items that don't show up in an audio guide vendor's quote — re-booked voice talent, studio re-engineering for mid-tour edits, handset attrition, per-language requoting, and content amortized over short exhibition runs.
10 MIN READ·READHow to choose museum audio guide software: an evaluation checklist.
A procurement-grade evaluation framework for museum audio guide software — nine dimensions to score every vendor on, plus honest notes on which platforms lead on which axes.
12 MIN READ·READTotal cost of ownership: hardware vs phone-based museum audio guides.
A five-year TCO model comparing the handset-and-studio model to a phone-based, AI-narrated platform — capex, opex, content production, staff hours, and the line items every RFP forgets.
12 MIN READ·READ
Multilingual interpretation
How many languages a museum audio guide actually needs — and how to produce them without re-recording.
READ THE GUIDEHow many languages does a museum audio guide actually need?
A practical method for deriving the right language list from city tourism data, Census language-at-home figures, and your own visitor survey — and why the standard US art-museum list usually lands at seven to ten.
10 MIN READ·READRe-voicing a museum audio tour across ten languages without a studio.
The operational mechanics of re-voicing an approved English tour across ten languages on an AI-narrated platform — the workflow, where human review is still non-negotiable, and how it compares to the studio-and-cast model it replaces.
9 MIN READ·READServing tourist and non-English-speaking museum audiences.
The case for serving non-English-speaking visitors — international tourists and the residents who speak English in public but want interpretation in their first language — and what that actually requires of an interpretation program.
11 MIN READ·READTranslation vs localization for cultural interpretation.
Translation moves words across a language boundary; localization moves meaning across a cultural one. For museum audio, the difference decides whether a visitor in their second language feels addressed or merely accommodated.
11 MIN READ·READ
Accessibility & inclusion
Audio description, visual descriptions, WCAG, and the law of the land for museum interpretation.
READ THE GUIDEADA accessibility requirements for museum audio guides.
What the ADA actually says about museum audio guides — Title II for public museums, Title III for private ones, the 2024 DOJ web rule, and how museums commonly implement effective communication today. Not legal advice.
13 MIN READ·READCaptions, transcripts, and hearing accommodations in museum audio guides.
A practical guide to making museum audio guides usable for Deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors — captions, transcripts, hearing-loop and T-coil hardware, hearing-aid pairing, ASL video, and where AI helps and where it doesn't.
9 MIN READ·READWCAG for visitor-facing museum audio guide web apps.
A practical, criterion-by-criterion guide to meeting WCAG 2.1 AA in a phone-based museum audio guide — what each rule actually requires, where web players quietly break, and what BYOD inherits from the visitor's own device.
11 MIN READ·READ
Visitor experience
What museum visitors expect in 2026 — BYOD, QR codes, dwell time, and the death of the rented handset.
READ THE GUIDEBYOD vs rented handsets in museum audio guides.
An honest comparison of bring-your-own-device audio guides against rented handsets — what museum visitors actually carry, what handset fleets actually cost to run, and the four cases where rented hardware still wins.
11 MIN READ·READMeasuring museum audio guide engagement: what to track.
A practical guide to the metrics that matter for a 2026 audio guide program — broadcast metrics for the listen-through, conversation metrics for the questions, and the one slide a board will actually use.
10 MIN READ·READQR codes in museums: adoption and best practices.
A practical guide to QR codes for museum audio guides — where to place the wall card, what size to print, when to use dynamic codes, how to solve the first-scan problem, and why QR cleared the bar that native apps couldn't.
9 MIN READ·READSelf-guided tours and dwell time in museums.
What the dwell-time literature actually says about self-guided audio tours, where the evidence is honest, and why 'questions asked' may be a better signal of a good visit than minutes spent.
10 MIN READ·READ
Operations
Building, updating, and running tours across exhibitions, sites, and time — without a studio.
READ THE GUIDEAudio guides for temporary and traveling exhibitions.
Why the studio-production math never penciled out for a ten-week show, how AI-narrated guides change the economics, and how to handle shared content, venue addenda, rights, and language regions on a touring exhibition.
11 MIN READ·READAudio tours for walking tours, campus tours, and city tours.
How audio-guide requirements actually differ for outdoor walking tours, university campuses, and multi-stop city tours — GPS vs QR, offline caching, weather, and where AI platforms fit versus specialist walking-tour apps.
11 MIN READ·READMulti-site and multi-venue audio tour management.
How museum systems with multiple sites — Smithsonian-scale, regional historical societies, university museum networks, heritage portfolios — actually run audio interpretation across venues without losing local voice or central control.
11 MIN READ·READSame-day tour updates: what AI changes about content cadence.
Why the traditional audio model froze content the moment the studio session closed, how AI moves a correction from a project to a Tuesday, and the operational discipline that has to come with same-day updates.
9 MIN READ·READ