VISITOR Q&A

A tour your visitors
can talk to.

The biggest shift in interpretation isn’t the audio — it’s that visitors now expect to ask. Convo’s conversational layer lets a visitor pause the tour at any stop and put a question to the guide in voice, text, or by holding their phone up to the object. The answer comes back grounded in the curator’s source materials, in the visitor’s language. When the guide can’t ground an answer, it says so.

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THE VISITOR FLOW

A tour your visitors
can talk to.

A visitor scans the QR at the wall card, the tour opens in their browser — no download, no account. At any stop they can tap a button and ask the guide a question: why is his hand carved like that, what is this material, is this the artist’s late work, can you say that last part again, slower. The tour pauses, the guide answers, and the visitor chooses to keep going or to ask something else. The shift from listening to asking is small in description and large in feeling.

Van Gogh in Arles
STOP 01 · NOW PLAYING
The Sunflowers
STOP 01 OF 05
0:01
-1:21
ASK
VOICE
admin.convo.app/tours/van-gogh-arles/stops/01/sources
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STOP 01 · THE SUNFLOWERS
Where answers come from
● 4 ATTACHED
CURATOR-ATTACHED REFERENCE MATERIALS
PDF
catalog_2018.pdf
p.142 · The Sunflowers
8 KB
DOCX
wall_text_v3.docx
Arles period intro
2 KB
PDF
letters_to_theo.pdf
August 1888 · 4 letters
14 KB
CSV
provenance.csv
12 transfers · 1888–1987
3 KB
GROUNDING POLICY
The guide answers only from these. No open internet. No pre-training. Declines when it can’t ground.
GROUNDED IN YOUR SOURCES

Grounded in your
reference materials.

When a visitor asks, the guide searches the reference set the curator uploaded — wall cards, catalog entries, exhibition essays, scholarly articles — and composes an answer from them, in the same voice as the rest of the tour. It does not improvise. It does not reach to the open internet. It does not pull what it learned in pre-training and frame it as your institution’s answer. The boundary is the institution’s canon.

THREE WAYS TO ASK

Voice, text, and image —
in every language.

Voice taps the microphone and answers aloud; we shipped it on OpenAI’s Realtime API over WebRTC, so the latency feels like conversation, not a command line. Text is the unobtrusive mode for quiet galleries. Image lets a visitor hold the camera up to an object — useful for archaeological fragments, geology, or installations where the relationship between object and card isn’t one-to-one. All three modes share the same source set, the same refusal behavior, the same ten languages.

Van Gogh in Arles
ASK · The Sunflowers
Ask me what you’re looking at.
TELL ME MOREWHAT TO LOOK FORWHY SIGN HERE
Ask about The Sunflowers…
Van Gogh in Arles
ASK · The Sunflowers
What did Vincent earn from this painting?
⊘ NO GROUNDED SOURCE
I don’t have a source from the curators on that. Want what I do know?
SHOW WHAT I KNOWASK STAFF
Ask about The Sunflowers…
GRACEFUL REFUSAL

Declines when it can’t
ground an answer.

When the reference set doesn’t contain a basis for the answer, the guide declines and tells the visitor so. A confident invention from a museum tour is worse than an honest miss. The platform also filters obvious abuse before it reaches a response. The procurement-grade trust argument is simple: the guide is bounded by the same canon the curators built it on, and new canon ships when you ship it. Nothing else.

THE FEEDBACK LOOP

Every question becomes
editorial signal.

Every visitor interaction is logged in the admin. A curator can open a tour, go to any stop, and read the actual conversations that happened there — question, answer, time, language, and the source passages the model leaned on. Declined questions are particularly useful: they tell you what visitors wanted to know that the canon didn’t cover. Sometimes the fix is to upload one more essay; sometimes it’s to rewrite a stop. The Q&A log becomes a feedback channel back into the institution’s own interpretation.

admin.convo.app/qa-log
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Q&A AUDIT LOG
Declined questions
ALLDECLINED
QUESTIONWHERESTATUS
What did this scribe earn?
STOP 04
DECLINED
Where was it discovered?
STOP 04
ANSWERED
Is this the original?
STOP 04
DECLINED
What does the hieroglyph say?
STOP 04
ANSWERED
Who excavated the site?
STOP 04
DECLINED
COMMON QUESTIONS

What procurement asks about the Q&A.

The guide says so. It’s designed to decline rather than guess. The visitor sees a short message that the question isn’t covered by the materials for this stop, and is invited to keep listening or to ask something else. Curators see the declined question in the admin log, which is often the most useful signal of all — it tells you what visitors wanted to know that you didn’t plan for.
Not by design. Every visitor answer is grounded in the reference materials the curator uploaded for that tour — wall cards, catalog entries, exhibition essays, scholarly articles, whatever you provided. The model is instructed to refuse rather than to fill in plausible-sounding detail. No system is perfect, but the failure mode we optimize for is a graceful decline, not a confident invention.
All ten Convo languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic. A visitor can ask in any of them — by voice or text — and the answer comes back in the same language, grounded in the same source set. The curator authors once.
It’s logged and shared with the institution that runs the tour, not exposed publicly. The admin shows the question, the guide’s answer, and the stop it happened at. Visitors don’t have to create an account, and we don’t attach a question to a real identity. Your reference materials and your visitor data are not used to train models.
The same refusal behavior applies: the guide answers from your sources only, and declines anything outside them. The platform also filters obvious abuse before it reaches a response. Inappropriate questions still appear in the log so you can see what’s being asked, but they don’t produce a response that could embarrass the institution.
Not yet through a per-tour rule editor in admin. The default refusal posture is the platform’s — answer from your sources, decline when you can’t — and it’s a deliberate one. If your collection has a sensitive topic that needs special handling, the right move today is to shape the reference materials and the curator note that sits in front of the tour, and we’ll work through edge cases with you directly.
The audio tour itself plays in a browser and is resilient to flaky connections. The conversational layer needs a live network round-trip — voice in, model, voice out — so a true dead zone is the one place it can’t reach. Most institutions solve this with venue Wi-Fi at the entrance, which is enough to bootstrap. If the gallery is genuinely offline, the linear tour still plays; the Q&A pauses until signal returns.
HEAR IT FOR YOURSELF

Pick one gallery.
Give us two weeks.