Convo and Bloomberg Connects: complementary, not competitive.

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 distribution, you very well might. 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. Bloomberg Connects is a place to put content so visitors can find it. Convo is a tool to make that content — to draft it, voice it in ten languages, and keep it current — and to give visitors a tour they can actually talk to. The more useful frame isn't "which one wins" but "which job are you trying to do: distribute content, or produce it?" Most of the time the answer is both, and the two platforms are complementary far more often than they are competitive.

How they fit together

Because this is the most important point in the piece, it goes first.

Bloomberg Connects gets your content to visitors. Convo produces and maintains that content — and exporting it to Bloomberg Connects is easy. A museum can keep Bloomberg Connects as the discovery channel for the consumer who already has the app, and use Convo to do the production work behind it: turn reference materials into a scripted tour, voice it across ten languages, revoice the whole thing in about a minute when the script changes, and push the result out — including to Bloomberg Connects.

That division of labor is the point. Bloomberg Connects doesn't write your scripts, translate your tour, or re-record it when a label changes; you do, in their CMS. Convo is built to do exactly that work. So the "use both" shape isn't two competing apps fighting over the same visitor — it's a production tool feeding a distribution channel.

And there's one thing Convo does that Bloomberg Connects doesn't do at all: let the visitor ask questions. If your interpretation strategy includes a conversational layer at the stop, that lives in the Convo player, and it's the clearest single reason to bring Convo in.

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, record, translate, 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)

The thing to hold onto: Bloomberg Connects hosts and distributes the content. It does not produce it for you.

What is Convo, in one paragraph?

Convo is a SaaS platform that produces multilingual, conversational audio tours from a museum's own source materials. 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. When a script changes, the whole tour revoices in about a minute. And when you want that content in Bloomberg Connects too, exporting it is easy. See our pricing page for the full breakdown.

The dimensions where the platforms differ

Because the platforms are doing different jobs — distribution versus production — most "vs" feature lists miss the point. The dimensions below aren't a scorecard. They're meant to clarify which platform does which job.

Production vs distribution

This is the whole story in one line. Bloomberg Connects is where finished content goes to be found. Convo is where content gets made. With Bloomberg Connects, your team writes the scripts, records the audio, arranges the translations, and uploads it all through the CMS; Bloomberg maintains the app it lives in. With Convo, you upload source materials and the platform drafts, voices, and translates the tour for you — then you can publish it to your own QR-code web player, to Bloomberg Connects, or both.

If your team already has the time and budget to produce and translate everything in-house, Bloomberg Connects gives you a free, well-run place to host it. If producing and maintaining that content is the part you need help with, that's the gap Convo fills.

Conversational layer

This is the dimension where the platforms are most clearly different. 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 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. There is no equivalent in Bloomberg Connects — this is unique to the Convo player. We've written about why we think that shape matters in the audio guide is not the product.

Languages

Bloomberg Connects supports multilingual content, but 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 production model is often what makes the multilingual program possible at all. We unpack the math in the audio guide pricing models piece.

Editorial cadence

With Bloomberg Connects, an update means re-producing the segment and uploading it through the CMS, then through Bloomberg's review/release process. With Convo, you edit the script in the admin and republish in seconds — and every active language track regenerates with it. For a rotating gallery, a temporary exhibition, or a corrected attribution, that difference in cadence is the difference between "this week" and "next quarter."

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 30-day pilot, upload reference materials, and ship a tour in days. No review committee, no info session.

At-a-glance matrix

The matrix is a quick reference, not a scoreboard. Where the two columns look very different, it's usually because one platform distributes content and the other produces it.

When Bloomberg Connects is the right answer

For a lot of institutions, the honest answer is "use Bloomberg Connects." If any of the following describe you, we'd tell you the same thing on a 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. You have the capacity to produce and translate your own content. Bloomberg Connects gives you a polished, free place to host content your team can write, record, and translate in-house. If production isn't the bottleneck for you, you may not need a production tool alongside it.

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 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.

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 feeding Bloomberg Connects, or as the standalone choice.

1. Producing the content is the hard part. Turning reference materials into a finished, voiced, translated tour is the work you don't have time or budget for. That's the work Convo automates: draft, voice, translate, publish. You can then distribute the result wherever you like, Bloomberg Connects included.

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 the Convo player does, and there's no equivalent in Bloomberg Connects.

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. Editorial cadence in seconds — edit a script, republish, done — is what makes "every exhibition gets audio" actually possible.

4. You want multilingual reach without recording every language. Up to ten active languages — from more than forty supported — out of one English source. For institutions whose visitors are meaningfully multilingual and whose staff capacity to record in five languages is zero, the production model is often the only way the multilingual program happens at all.

5. 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.

If those describe you, our free 30-day pilot is meant to let you find out without a procurement cycle — including as the production layer behind 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.

What Bloomberg Connects is, though, is a place to distribute content — not a tool to produce it. Both things can be true: it's a remarkable distribution channel, and you still need to make the content that goes into it. That's the gap Convo fills, and it's why the two work well together rather than against each other.

FAQ

The verdict: distribute with Bloomberg Connects, produce with Convo

The honest read on Bloomberg Connects and Convo is that they're not really competitors. Bloomberg Connects answers one question — what if a foundation absorbed the cost of running a digital-guide platform and made it free, well-designed, and global, in exchange for living inside a single consumer app. Convo answers a different one — what if producing that content (scripting it, voicing it in the languages your visitors speak, keeping it current) took minutes instead of a production cycle, and the visitor could talk to the tour.

For institutions that already produce their own content and just need somewhere free to host it, Bloomberg Connects is the right call, and you shouldn't pay us a subscription to feel modern about it. For institutions where producing and maintaining the content is the real work — and especially for those who want the conversational layer — Convo is the right tool, whether you distribute through your own QR-code web player, through Bloomberg Connects, or both.

The frame that's wrong is "Convo vs Bloomberg Connects, pick one." The frame that's right is produce, then distribute. Make the content in Convo, get it in front of visitors through Bloomberg Connects, and reach for the Convo player when you want a tour your visitors can actually talk to.

If you want to see what a Convo tour feels like for your collection — standalone, or as the production layer behind an existing Bloomberg Connects program — our free 30-day pilot is a one-tour, no-commitment 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.