A Walkthrough of the Walkie Talkie Producer Area

Walkie Talkie is a tool for museums to produce their own audio guides. It is built so that curators can share what they know about an exhibition themselves, in any language, without routing the work through a developer or an agency.

Visitors scan a QR code and listen. There is no app to install and no account to create.

Everything happens in the producer area. There are no passwords to manage, and creating your first guides is free.

A location is the place a guide belongs to. That might be a museum, a park, or whatever unit makes sense for how your organisation is arranged. You add a logo and choose the languages you want to support.

Every text field carries a translate button, which generates versions in your other languages from whatever you have written in your main one.

An exhibition is a playlist of chapters. They are quick enough to create that you can run several side by side over the same collection — one written for children, a longer format for visitors who want depth, and a version aimed at visually impaired visitors.

Translations are added exactly as they are everywhere else.

A chapter is a single stop: one work, one object, one room. You fill in the fields and watch the device preview update alongside them, so you can see what a visitor will see while you write.

The field that matters most is the text itself, because that is what becomes the audio guide. Once you are happy with it, you generate a spoken version and it is ready within seconds.

You can also upload MP3s of human readings instead. Those recordings can be transcribed back into text, which in turn gives you a route to versions in other languages.

All of it ends up behind a QR code. There are codes for individual chapters and codes for whole exhibitions, and choosing between them is a judgement about the space.

A room holding several artefacts is usually better served by a single exhibition code. An outdoor sculpture standing on its own is better with its own chapter code.

Because the narration is generated from your text, revising a guide means editing the words and generating again. The QR code stays the same, so anything already printed and mounted in the building remains valid.

That matters more than it sounds. It means the text is not frozen the day it goes on the wall, and you can keep refining what you say as you learn how visitors actually use it.

Guides work on any smartphone. There is no GDPR banner, and visitors keep full privacy.

Content is stored on EU-based servers, isolated from search engines and AI scrapers.

You can invite colleagues to work on content with you. The data belongs to you, and all of it can be exported as a single zip file whenever you want it.

There is also analytics, showing anonymous listening statistics so you can see which chapters visitors reach and which they finish.

Walkie Talkie is built and owned by the two of us — Åsmund in Copenhagen and Thor in Norway. There is no outside ownership of the project, and we have been fortunate to partner with some excellent institutions already.

Pricing is a flat rate covering effectively unlimited audio, so producing more guides does not produce a larger bill.

This walkthrough covers the shape of the platform rather than all of it. If you would like to see the remainder, we are glad to get on a call and talk through what it would look like for your institution.