Type "audio tour" into any app store and you get the same thing forty different ways: a recording, a map pin, and a play button. Walk up to the pin, hit play, and a narrator talks at you for ninety seconds. Walk away and it stops. Ask a question and nothing happens. There's nobody there.
Enough people have asked us how Explorio actually knows what they're asking that it's worth explaining properly.
It starts with where you are
Your phone's GPS tells Explorio roughly where you're standing. That spot gets matched to curated material for those few square meters: not only "this is the Colosseum," but the stories, angles, and open questions our research turns up there. As you walk, new places trigger new narration on their own. No menu tapping. No squinting at a map.
Then it listens
While the narration plays, Explorio is also listening for you. Ask "wait, who built this?" or "why does that statue only have one arm?" and the question goes to a language model that already has the context: what you're looking at, what's already been said, and researched material about the place.
The model isn't working from general knowledge alone. It's grounded in material we've researched and verified for your specific tour, so the answer fits the place you're standing in, not just something that sounds plausible.
The aim is a friend who knows a lot about where you are and is excited to show you around.
And it remembers the conversation
Ask a follow-up ("did he ever finish it?") and Explorio knows what "it" means, because it's tracking the conversation rather than answering each question in isolation. Follow-ups work the way they do with a person, not a search bar bolted onto a map.
What happens to your questions afterward
Nothing gets stored long-term. Your conversation is used to generate the response in the moment, then it's gone. We go into more detail in our privacy policy. The short version: your curiosity is yours, not a training set.
Why voice matters when you're walking
You can type if you want. The point is keeping walking, phone in your pocket, and asking out loud. Stare at a screen to interact and you've drifted into a reading assignment with steps.
That's the mechanism: location triggers narration, narration invites questions, questions get real answers, and the tour keeps moving with you. No scripts to sit through. No dead end when your curiosity goes somewhere the writers didn't plan for.