Every museum we talk to eventually asks the same question. "Why wouldn't we just use Bloomberg Connects?" It's a fair question, and the most honest answer we can give is: for a lot of you, you should. Bloomberg Connects is the giant in this category — free, well-designed, philanthropically funded, and already on millions of arts-attentive phones. We're not going to pretend otherwise to win a sale.
What we will say is that Convo and Bloomberg Connects aren't really the same kind of thing, and the more useful frame isn't "which one wins" but "which job are you trying to do, and on which surface." The two platforms are complementary far more often than they are competitive. Several institutions run both. This piece is the honest read I'd want a director or visitor-experience lead to have on their desk — written by the founder of Convo, so I have a horse in this race, but written to help you decide correctly rather than to tilt the answer.
Can we use both? (Yes — and here's the pattern.)
Because this is the most important answer in the piece, it goes first.
Yes. Several institutions run Bloomberg Connects and Convo side-by-side, and the pattern is straightforward. Bloomberg Connects is the discoverability and global-audience channel — the consumer who already has the app on their phone, who downloaded it for MoMA or the Met and is now browsing for what else is on the platform, finds you there. A Convo tour at the QR code on the gallery wall is the in-gallery experience — the visitor who's standing in front of the work, in your building, on a phone they didn't have to download anything onto, opens a tour that looks and feels like your institution and can be asked questions in their own language.
The content can overlap or diverge depending on the program. Some institutions publish a curated set of stops to Bloomberg Connects for the at-home and pre-visit audience, and run a deeper conversational tour on Convo for the in-gallery audience. Others use Bloomberg Connects as the polished video / audio container for marquee pieces and use Convo for the rotating exhibitions where editorial cadence matters most. Neither platform requires exclusivity. There is no contractual or technical conflict in running both.
The "use both" pattern is the right answer more often than people expect, because the two platforms genuinely solve different problems. The rest of this piece is about those problems.
What is Bloomberg Connects, in one paragraph?
Bloomberg Connects is a free consumer mobile app that aggregates digital guides from over 1,250 cultural institutions worldwide into one downloadable experience. Created and funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the app lets visitors browse and explore guides from partners including MoMA, the Met, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Frick, the Brooklyn Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the MFA Boston, the Serpentine, the National Portrait Gallery in London, Storm King, Mori Art Museum, La Biennale di Venezia, MOCA, the Phillips Collection, and many others. The app is free to download, free for visitors to use, and free for cultural institutions to join. Bloomberg's team maintains the platform; partner institutions write and upload their own content through a Bloomberg-built CMS. The model is funded outright by Bloomberg Philanthropies as part of their arts portfolio. There is no advertising, no per-visitor fee, and no subscription. (Bloomberg Connects FAQ; Bloomberg Philanthropies)
What is Convo, in one paragraph?
Convo is a SaaS platform that museums and cultural institutions use to publish their own multilingual, conversational audio tours on their own URL. Curators upload reference materials — catalogs, wall cards, exhibition notes, CSV exports from the collection database — and Convo drafts scripts, voices them in ten languages, and publishes them to visitors' phones through a QR code at the venue. Once a tour is live, visitors can ask follow-up questions at any stop — in chat or voice, in their own language — grounded in the curator's source materials. Tours are branded as your institution. Visitor data belongs to you. See our pricing page for the full breakdown.
The dimensions where the platforms differ
Because the platforms are doing different jobs, most "vs" feature lists miss the point. The dimensions below aren't meant as a scorecard — they're meant to clarify which surface you'd choose for which job. On most of these, the right read isn't "Convo wins" or "Bloomberg wins" but "this is the right shape for that surface, and that's the right shape for the other."
Ownership and surface
With Bloomberg Connects, your guide lives inside Bloomberg's consumer app. The visitor downloads "Bloomberg Connects — Arts+Culture" from the App Store, browses cultural partners, and opens yours. Bloomberg owns the platform, maintains the app, owns the relationship with the visitor's device, and sets the product roadmap. You are a partner, in the gracious philanthropic sense of the word.
With Convo, you're running your own audio-guide product. The guide lives at a URL you control — typically a QR code at the gallery wall opens a branded tour under your institution's name. There is no app for the visitor to download. The surface a visitor sees is unambiguously yours.
For the at-home / pre-visit / discovery audience, "guest in a well-curated apartment" is a useful surface to occupy. For the in-gallery audience standing at the wall, "the institution's own surface" is often the right one. Different jobs, different surfaces. This is the cleanest case for running both.
Branding and visual control
Bloomberg Connects is impressively customizable for an aggregator app. The team built a "highly customizable" splash screen for each institution, which they describe as the "digital front door" to a partner's guide. The CMS lets you manage your collection content with little technical background.
Customization stops at the splash screen and the content inside it, by design — the navigation, typography, interaction patterns, and global UI are consistent across 1,250 partners so visitors learn the app once. That consistency is what makes the aggregator work.
Convo is the opposite shape. The tour is a web experience your institution publishes; the visual system is yours. Typography, color, the way the cover renders, the way a stop opens, the way the conversation surface appears — all configured to your institution. The trade-off is the inverse: we don't sit inside a 1,250-partner discovery app, and we accept that.
If your in-gallery surface needs to feel unmistakably like your institution and your at-home discovery surface benefits from a consistent app shell, both shapes are correct — just for different jobs.
Conversational layer
This is the dimension where the platforms are most clearly doing different things. Bloomberg Connects is a beautifully curated container for static media — audio, video, text, image — that institutions write, record, and upload. The visitor experience is consume-the-content: tap a stop, watch a video, read a panel, listen to a curator-recorded segment. That's a real and valuable shape.
Convo's tours are also curator-authored — every script is approved by a curator before it ships — but the visitor's experience includes a conversational layer. At any stop, the visitor can ask a question — "what's it made of," "why is she holding that," "what's the connection to the next room" — in chat or voice, in their own language. Answers are grounded in the curator's uploaded reference materials and decline to answer when they can't be grounded. The same tour adapts to a child, an art historian, and a tourist on the same afternoon, off the same source material.
If your interpretation strategy is "give visitors a beautifully crafted set of curated pieces," Bloomberg Connects fits well. If it's "let every visitor follow their own curiosity from what we put in front of them," that's the shape Convo was built for. We've written more about why we think that shape matters in the audio guide is not the product.
Access and onboarding
Bloomberg Connects is invitation-only. The path is an interest form, an info session, and a Bloomberg-led onboarding process. Bloomberg has been explicit that the partners who benefit most are museums and galleries, gardens and parks, sculpture parks, public art programs, historic houses, and heritage sites "regularly accessible to the public for onsite visitation." Smaller institutions, niche operators, traveling exhibitions, and tour operators outside that profile sometimes don't get in, and the onboarding cadence is Bloomberg's, not yours.
Convo is open sign-up. You start a free Pilot tier, upload reference materials, and ship a tour in days. No review committee, no info session.
These aren't competing features — they're matched to different goals. Bloomberg's curated partner network is part of what makes the app trustworthy for consumers. Convo's open sign-up is what makes it usable for the rotating exhibit opening in eight weeks. If you fit Bloomberg's profile and you can wait, get in. If you can't, that's not Bloomberg failing; that's a different job.
Languages
Bloomberg Connects supports multilingual content; each language is content the institution records and uploads. Convo voices ten languages from one English source and revoices the whole tour in roughly a minute when the script changes. For institutions whose visitors are meaningfully multilingual but whose staff capacity to record in five languages is zero, the AI model is often what makes the multilingual program possible at all. We unpack the math in the audio guide pricing models piece.
Visitor data
Bloomberg Connects aggregates visitor analytics inside Bloomberg's platform; partners get partner-level reporting. Convo's visitor data lives in your Convo account and isn't shared across institutions. If you want core engagement metrics and anonymized themes from what visitors asked across the museum to live in your CRM, your annual report, and your fundraising deck, that's a meaningful platform-shape difference. We've written about the kind of board-ready insight that becomes possible when every visit is a conversation in the 2026 museum visitor.
At-a-glance matrix
The matrix is a quick reference, not a scoreboard. Where the two columns look very different, it's usually because the platforms are doing different jobs.
| Dimension | Bloomberg Connects | Convo | |---|---|---| | Primary job | Aggregated discovery + at-home / pre-visit experience | In-gallery experience on the institution's own surface | | Cost to institution | Free (Bloomberg Philanthropies-funded) | Free Pilot · paid tiers above; see pricing | | Cost to visitor | Free | Free | | Delivery surface | Native iOS / Android app the visitor downloads | Web tour opened by scanning a QR code; no app download | | Branded as | A guide inside the Bloomberg Connects app | Your institution, on your URL | | Onboarding | Invitation-only (interest form + info session) | Open sign-up; pilot tier is free with no time limit | | Content control | Institution writes and uploads; Bloomberg maintains the app | Institution writes (or edits AI drafts); Convo handles voicing, languages, hosting | | Conversational layer | Curated static media (audio / video / text / image) | Visitors can ask follow-up questions at every stop; grounded in your materials | | Languages | Whatever the institution records and uploads | Ten languages from one source; ~60 seconds to revoice an entire tour | | Editorial cadence | Updates go through Bloomberg's review/release process | Edit in admin, republish in seconds | | Visitor data | Aggregated in Bloomberg's analytics | Your data; your account | | Discoverability | Inside a 1,250+ partner consumer app | On your channels; QR code in the venue is the primary entry |
When Bloomberg Connects is the right answer
I want to spend real space on this section because for a lot of institutions, the honest answer is "use Bloomberg Connects." If any of the following describe you, I'd tell you the same thing on a sales call.
1. You have no budget for a digital guide and you're not going to get one. Free that's also professionally maintained is genuinely hard to beat. If the alternative is no audio guide at all, Bloomberg Connects is the right answer almost regardless of the other dimensions. It's also philanthropically defensible — "we partnered with Bloomberg" lands well with boards in a way that "we picked a vendor" doesn't.
2. Your visitors are already arts-attentive and already in the app. A frequent MoMA / Met / Guggenheim visitor has Bloomberg Connects on their phone. If your institution is in that orbit and your visitors overlap, joining the app the visitor already uses for their other museums has a real discoverability story. The marginal visitor finds you because they were already browsing.
3. Your priority is institutional credibility-by-association. Some institutions benefit from sitting on the same shelf as the Met and the Whitney. Being in Bloomberg Connects is, among other things, a credentialing move — it signals you're in the company Bloomberg picks. If that signal is more valuable to you than a custom-branded in-gallery surface, the trade-off lands well.
4. Your content is well-suited to curated static media. A museum whose interpretation strategy is "produce a small number of beautifully crafted videos and audio segments and let visitors browse them" is, frankly, well-served by Bloomberg's container. The CMS is good, the team is responsive, and the app respects the content. If you don't need a conversational layer, you don't need a separate platform for one.
5. You have light operational capacity. Bloomberg Connects maintains the app, ships updates, handles app-store relationships, deals with iOS / Android version drift, and provides training and marketing support. For institutions running on a tiny digital team, "we don't have to operate any of that" is a major operational win.
6. You fit their partner profile and you're patient with their onboarding cadence. If you're a brick-and-mortar museum, gallery, garden, sculpture park, historic house, or heritage site with regular public visitation, you're in the eligible profile. If you're patient with the onboarding cadence, you'll get in eventually.
If most of these describe your institution, submit an interest form to Bloomberg Connects. It's a great answer.
When Convo fits alongside (or instead)
The other side of the same question. If any of these describe you, Convo is likely worth running — either alongside Bloomberg Connects, or as the standalone choice.
1. You want your in-gallery surface to feel like your institution. Own URL. Own visual system. The QR code at the gallery wall opens a tour that looks and feels like your wall text, your typography, your color, your voice. For institutions where brand integrity at the visitor surface matters, that distinction is load-bearing — and it's compatible with also being inside Bloomberg Connects for the discovery surface.
2. You want a conversational layer at the stop. Your interpretation strategy includes letting visitors ask their own questions — at a stop, in their own language, grounded in your materials. That's what Convo's tours do, and it's a different shape of experience from curated static media.
3. You need to ship on your own cadence. A temporary exhibition opening in six weeks. A traveling show with a ten-week run. A rotating gallery that re-installs three times a year. A pilot at a satellite site. Editorial cadence in seconds — edit a script in the admin, republish, done — is what makes "every exhibition gets audio" actually possible.
4. You want your visitor data to live with your institution. Engagement metrics and anonymized themes from what visitors asked across the museum, in your CRM, your annual report, your fundraising deck.
5. You want multilingual reach without recording every language. Ten languages from one English source. For institutions whose visitors are meaningfully multilingual and whose staff capacity to record in five languages is zero, the AI model is often the only way the multilingual program happens at all.
6. You aren't in Bloomberg's eligible partner profile, or you can't wait. Tour operators. Independent curators publishing a guide for a specific show. Cultural sites with non-traditional visitor patterns. Pilots that need to go live in days. Convo's open sign-up is built for these cases.
7. You've already evaluated AI audio guides as a category. If you've read the pillar guide on AI audio guides and you're past the category-level question, Convo competes in that category. Bloomberg Connects isn't the right benchmark there — it's a different category.
If those describe you, our free Pilot tier is meant to let you find out without a procurement cycle — including alongside an existing Bloomberg Connects program.
A note on philanthropic funding
It's worth saying this directly. Bloomberg Connects is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies as part of their arts and culture portfolio, and it is, by any honest reading, an extraordinary act of philanthropic infrastructure. A single foundation has absorbed the cost of building, operating, and continuously maintaining a global cultural-content platform — at a scale that no museum sector body or government agency has matched — and has made it free to institutions of every size. The Met, MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, and Storm King are on the same platform as small regional museums that would never have afforded a digital guide otherwise. That's a real public good, and it shouldn't be flattened in the rush to write a vendor comparison.
What it isn't, however, is a substitute for owning your in-gallery digital interpretation surface. The two things can both be true: Bloomberg Connects is a remarkable piece of philanthropy and it's a different shape from the platform a museum operates itself on its own URL. The "use both" pattern is the proof — institutions don't have to choose between respecting the philanthropy and owning their surface.
FAQ
The verdict: different jobs, deployed together where it fits
The honest read on Bloomberg Connects and Convo is that they're not really competitors. They're answering different questions about what a museum's digital interpretation surface should be. Bloomberg Connects answers: what if a foundation absorbed the cost and operational burden of running a digital-guide platform, and made it free and well-designed and global, in exchange for living inside a single consumer app. Convo answers: what if every museum could operate its own multilingual, conversational audio guide on its own surface, in days, without giving up the brand or the data or the editorial cadence.
For institutions where the first answer fills the whole need, Bloomberg Connects is the right call, and you shouldn't pay us a subscription to feel modern about it. For institutions where the second answer is the missing piece — typically the in-gallery surface, the conversational layer, the editorial cadence, and the visitor data — Convo is the right shape, sometimes alongside Bloomberg Connects and sometimes on its own. Both can be true on the same campus.
The frame that's wrong is "Convo vs Bloomberg Connects, pick one." The frame that's right is which job, which surface. For a meaningful slice of institutions, the right answer is both — Bloomberg Connects as the discovery and at-home channel, Convo as the in-gallery experience the visitor opens by scanning a QR code on the wall. Different jobs, deployed together where it fits.
If you want to see what a Convo tour feels like for your collection — standalone, or alongside an existing Bloomberg Connects program — our free Pilot tier is a one-tour, no-time-limit way to find out. If you'd rather start with the category map before any vendor conversation, the pillar guide on AI audio guides is the place we'd send you first.
About the author
Eric Duffy is the founder of Convo, a platform that lets museums and cultural institutions publish multilingual audio tours their visitors can have a conversation with. He writes about the audio-guide category from inside it — drawing on RFP data, discovery calls with curators and directors, and the production economics of both the legacy studio-and-handset model and modern phone-based platforms. Reach him at eric@convo.app or on LinkedIn.