Interpretation that fits stone walls and open sky.
Heritage operations aren’t museum operations. The footprint is bigger, the weather participates, the cellular signal disappears in the basement, and the visitors are often standing in front of something a wall sign can’t carry. This is how Convo fits a heritage site rather than a gallery.
The breadth of what counts as a heritage site.
I think the word “museum” covers about a third of the people we should be talking to. The rest are running heritage trails that connect five or fifteen stops across a landscape, house museums with set tour times and a single docent-led pattern, monuments visited by a million people who never speak to staff, battlefields where the interpretation has to do almost all the work, archaeological sites where the visible remains are a tenth of the story, historic gardens, industrial heritage — the textile mill, the ironworks, the rail yard — and religious heritage sites that hold a daily service alongside the visitors who came for the architecture.
The common thread is that the cultural significance can’t be carried by wall text alone, the footprint is often outdoor or partly outdoor, the site is usually spread across more ground than a single gallery, and a meaningful share of the visitors are people for whom English is a second language. The first three of those break the equipment-based audio guide model. The fourth is the one most properties have given up on — printed translations in three languages, a German pamphlet that hasn’t been revised since 2014.
This page is for the people stewarding those properties: National Trust-style portfolios, state historical societies, archaeological site authorities, battlefield trusts, historic house directors, and the small non-profit boards that run a heritage trail across a county.
Phone-based, multilingual, and editable the same day.
The single biggest shift, for a heritage site, is that the tour lives on the visitor’s phone in their browser — no app download, no account, no hardware to distribute, charge, sanitise, or replace. A QR card at the ticket booth or the trailhead is the whole onboarding flow. For a property where the visitor experience is self-paced — most heritage sites — that removes the staff bottleneck that has historically tied interpretation to docent-led-only tour times. People who walk in at 2:47pm get the same tour as the people who showed up for the 10am. More on how the product works.
The second shift is languages. We voice every tour in ten — English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic — and the visitor picks on the welcome screen. For most heritage sites this is the biggest functional change to the visitor experience, because international tourism is a meaningful share of attendance and the printed-translation strategy quietly serves about thirty percent of the people standing in front of the object. When you edit a stop, the change re-voices across all ten languages in about a minute, so you stop choosing between updating the English script and maintaining the German one. How multilingual works.
The third shift is that visitors can ask the tour questions about what they’re looking at. They tap a microphone, ask “who lived here in 1812?” or hold up the phone to a carved date stone and ask what the inscription says, and the guide answers — grounded only in the materials your team uploaded, not the open internet. Every question and answer is logged, so the heritage team can read what people are actually asking and tighten the source materials when a question is being handled in a way they wouldn’t. How Visitor Q&A works.
The honest caveat: connectivity dead zones exist. The basement of a stone keep, deep in a forested section of a trail, inside a tomb or a chamber tomb — the cell tower can’t reach there. The stop audio caches on the phone the moment a visitor scans the QR, so the recorded experience keeps working as they walk through the bad spots. Live Q&A doesn’t, because the answer is generated server-side. The pragmatic answer most heritage sites land on is a small loaner-phone fleet at the welcome desk for the handful of guests who get stuck in the worst signal zones. It is not the whole experience; it is the fifteen-phone backstop.
The fourth shift is that the tour can change the same day. Heritage interpretation gets revised — new archaeological findings, a board that wants different framing on a contested chapter, a guided tour that walked through the visitor’s questions the same morning. There’s no studio relationship to break to make those changes. A curator edits the script in the admin, the platform re-voices across the languages, and the next visitor to scan the QR hears the new version. For properties used to a six-week turnaround on a recorded change, this is the unfamiliar part.
One trail. One room. Two to four weeks.
The way we do this is to pilot a small footprint with the interpretation copy you already have. For a heritage trail, that’s usually a single five- to twelve-stop loop — one trail, not the whole network. For a house museum, it’s one set of rooms — the parlor, the kitchen, the upstairs bedroom — rather than the whole house at once. For a monument or an archaeological site, it’s the main path most visitors actually walk.
The pilot tier — a single published tour, no time limit, no payment — is built for exactly this kind of low-commitment test. You upload the interpretation copy your team already maintains (wall cards, the docent script, the guidebook, scholarly articles you cite), we draft each stop in a voice that matches your existing materials, you read every stop, mark anything you’d say differently, and we publish. The full implementation timeline lives here.
Two adjacent reads if you’re scoping a heritage rollout: how multi-site operations work (one admin, many tours, shared review patterns) and running audio tours across a walking campus or open footprint (wayfinding, signage, the QR-at-the-entrance pattern). Both are written for heritage as much as for museums. Pricing for above-pilot scope is published here.
When this isn’t the right answer: if your interpretation lives almost entirely in a docent-led group experience that you actively want to preserve — a guided tomb tour, a working-mill demonstration that depends on the demonstrator — Convo doesn’t replace the docent and shouldn’t try. It’s a fit when you want self-paced visitors to get something close to the docent-led experience the rest of the week, or in the languages the docent doesn’t speak.