If you want to develop your own audio guide, start with the text, not the technology. How many stops will your route have? How long can each recording be? And how do you write something that sounds good through headphones while your visitor is looking at a painting, a facade or the edge of a forest? This guide takes you through those decisions in the order you make them.
How many stops does an audio tour need?
The number of stops follows from your route, not from a target number. Walk the route and note every place where a visitor naturally stops: in front of an object, on a square, at a viewpoint or at the entrance to a room. These are your candidates.
Then cut them down. A stop deserves a recording if there is something to point out and something to tell the visitor that they cannot read for themselves on the sign next to it. Is there still a stop where you only have a name and a year? Combine it with the one next to it, or leave it out.
Also look at the distance between stops. Two recordings five metres apart force your visitor into a stop-and-start rhythm; a ten-minute walk between stops makes the tour lose momentum. One stop every few minutes of walking keeps the flow going.
How long should one recording be?
The visitor is standing. That is the main limitation. As long as there is something to see that the recording is about, attention stays focused; once the text has moved past the image, people keep walking while a voice in their headphones is still talking.
So measure your recordings in speaking time, not in words on a page. Read your text aloud with a stopwatch, or have your platform‘s text-to-speech feature read it aloud and listen along. What seemed short on paper often turns out to be half a minute longer when spoken.
Vary the lengths. An opening recording that explains the route can be longer than a short instruction halfway through. A key object that everyone spends ten minutes looking at can handle more text than a stop people simply walk past. If every recording is the same length, your visitor hears a list; when the length follows what there is to see, they hear a story.
Follow one rule: one recording, one subject. As soon as you move from the building’s history to its current function and then to an anecdote about the architect in the same recording, it has become too long. Split it, or choose one subject.
Writing for the ear
A museum text is read; an audio recording is heard once, with no chance to turn back a page. That changes your sentences.
Use short sentences. One thought per sentence. Put the subject first and the verb soon after it, so the listener does not have to wait until the end of the sentence to find out who is doing what. Subordinate clauses that work well on paper lose their thread in speech.
Write as you speak. Use you, not a formal form of address, if that suits your organisation. Say “this building was already here before the city got its walls” instead of “the structure dates from the period preceding the construction of the city walls”. Avoid lists with more than three elements; nobody can keep a list of seven names in their head.
Point things out actively. An audio tour has one advantage over an information board: you know where the visitor is standing and what they are looking at. Use that. “Look at the third window arch from the left, it is narrower than the others.” Instructions like these direct the visitor’s gaze and immediately make it clear that the listener is in the right place.
Say numbers and abbreviations the way they sound. Write “seventeen fifty” or “fourteen metres high” in your script if that is what the voice needs to say. If you work with AI voices, you immediately hear how a year or abbreviation comes out and can adjust the spelling in your text accordingly.
And read everything aloud. Every tongue-twister and every sentence that makes you stop for breath halfway through is a sentence your visitor will struggle to follow too.
Distributing the story across the route
You have one story and ten to fifteen separate recordings. The challenge is to keep the story moving while each recording stands on its own, because a visitor who misses a stop or walks the route in reverse should not immediately lose the thread.
Start with the main line. What is this tour about? Not “this museum”, but one clear proposition: the harbour that made the city wealthy and was later abandoned, the factory that changed its product three times, or the forest planted by human hands. That line determines which stops belong in the tour and which, however interesting, fall outside it.
Then distribute the line across the route:
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Opening. Put the visitor in the right place and make the promise of the tour. How long does it take, where does it end and what will they hear? Keep it short, then start walking.
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Early stops. Introduce your theme through something concrete. No nuance yet, just something the visitor can look at.
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Middle sections. This is where you add depth: the conflict, the change and the details that make the image more complicated. Alternate between broad history and small, personal stories.
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High point. One stop is the answer to the promise made in the opening. Give it the most time and the strongest text.
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Closing. Briefly return to the main line and let the visitor go, with an optional reference to what else there is to do.
Make each recording stand on its own. A reference such as “as you just heard” fails for the first visitor who takes a different route. It is better to briefly repeat what is needed: one subordinate clause is enough to bring someone up to speed.
If you work with GPS triggers, the visitor’s location determines which recording starts, not your sequence. All the more reason to make each recording stand on its own and maintain the thread through short references instead of a strict order.
Writing in multiple languages: what to consider now
If you are going to translate your tour, your Dutch script should already take that into account. Wordplay, dialect and typically Dutch references are lost in translation or become incomprehensible. Remove them, or explain them in the recording itself for the foreign visitor.
Also consider length. The same content takes more words in German or French than in Dutch, so a recording that is exactly right in your native language may become slightly too long in another language. Leave some room in your timing so you can adjust it manually later instead of rewriting it.
Finally, write your names and numbers so they work in every language. You will usually leave a local street name or building name untranslated; add one descriptive word so the listener knows what they are looking at.
From script to tour
Once your script is ready, the rest is a matter of filling things in. In the Wandrz platform, you add your stops to the tour, paste the text into each stop and have text-to-speech turn it into a natural voice, in Dutch and in the languages you choose. Want to shorten a recording? Adjust the text and listen again, with no recording studio or technical hassle.
The editorial work is what matters. The number of stops, the length of each recording, the sentences that sound good to the ear and the line that runs through the route: when those are right, your tour can go live within a few hours. No hassle. Real impact.
Want someone to read through your script before you record it? Request a demo directly.
