A Walkthrough of the Walkie Talkie Producer Area

Walkie Talkie is a tool for museums to make their own audio guides. Curators write and publish them without going through a developer or an agency, in whatever languages they need.

Visitors scan a QR code and listen. No app, no login.

You work in the producer area. Signing in doesn't involve a password, and your first guides are free to make.

A location is the place your guide belongs to. It might be a museum, a park, or whatever unit fits the way your organisation is arranged. You add a logo and pick the languages you want.

Every text field has a translate button next to it. It takes what you wrote in your main language and produces the other versions.

An exhibition is a playlist of chapters. They are quick to set up, so you can run a few over the same collection: one for kids, a longer one for people who want more detail, one aimed at visually impaired visitors.

Translations work the same way here as everywhere else.

A chapter is one stop on the guide, usually a single work or a single room. You fill in the fields and the phone preview on the right updates as you type.

The field that matters is the text, since that becomes the audio. When it reads the way you want, hit generate and the spoken version is ready a few seconds later.

If you would rather use a human voice, upload an MP3 instead. Those recordings can be transcribed back into text, which then gives you something to translate.

All of it ends up behind a QR code. You get codes for single chapters and codes for whole exhibitions, and which one to use depends on the space.

A room with several objects in it usually works better with one exhibition code by the door. A sculpture standing on its own outside is easier with its own chapter code.

Since the audio comes from your text, changing a guide means editing the words and generating again. The QR code stays the same, so signs already printed and mounted stay valid.

The text isn't fixed the day it goes on the wall. You can keep adjusting it as you see how visitors use it.

Guides work on any smartphone, and visitors never meet a cookie banner, because there is nothing following them around to ask consent for.

The guides are also kept out of search results. Every chapter and location page is marked noindex, and those paths are blocked in robots.txt, so the work your curators write doesn't end up indexed by Google or hoovered into somebody's training set. Content is stored on servers inside the EU.

You can invite colleagues in to work on content with you. The data is yours, and you can download all of it as a single zip whenever you want.

There is analytics too, with anonymous listening stats, so you can see which chapters people reach and which ones they finish.

Walkie Talkie is built and owned by the two of us, Åsmund in Copenhagen and Thor in Norway. Nobody else has a stake in it. We have been lucky to work with some very good institutions already.

It is a flat rate, and it covers more or less unlimited audio. Making more guides does not cost more.

The video covers the main parts rather than everything. If you want to see the rest, we are happy to get on a call and talk through what it would look like for your institution.