Type "audio tour" into any app store and you'll 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 no one there to ask.
Explorio works differently, and enough people have asked us "wait, how does it actually know what I'm 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 location gets matched against a layer of curated content for that spot — not just "this is the Colosseum," but the specific stories, angles, and open questions our research turns up for that few square meters of a city. As you walk, new locations trigger new narration automatically. No tapping through a menu, no squinting at a map.
Then it listens
This is the part that's different. 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 your question goes to a language model that already has the context: what you're looking at, what's already been said, and a deep well of researched material about the place.
The model isn't guessing from general knowledge alone — it's grounded in material we've written and verified for that specific tour, so answers stay accurate to the place you're actually standing in, not just plausible-sounding.
The goal isn't to sound like an encyclopedia. It's to sound like a friend who happens to know an unreasonable amount about where you're standing.
And it remembers the conversation
If you ask a follow-up — "did he ever finish it?" — Explorio knows what "it" refers to, because it's tracking the conversation, not just answering questions in isolation. That's what makes it feel like a conversation instead of 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 and then it's gone — we go into more detail on this in our privacy policy, but the short version is: your curiosity is yours, not a training set.
Why voice, and why it matters for walking
You can type if you want to, but the whole point is being able to keep walking, phone in your pocket, and just ask out loud. A tour that requires you to stare at a screen to interact with it isn't really a walking tour anymore — it's a reading assignment with steps.
That's the whole 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 ends when your curiosity goes somewhere the writers didn't plan for.