How Tourient Uses AI Tools to Save You Time When Creating Audio Tours

A man in jacket and hoodie looks down at his phone whilst walking in front of a high brick wall

Building a great self-guided tour is rewarding work. From writing the stories, to choosing the stops, to seeing your visitors engage with the content—that's the part you signed up for.

What you didn't sign up for is the busywork around it. Translating your tour into five languages, writing ALT text for 415 images, transcribing an hour of narration, or hunting down (and paying) a voice actor for a quick revision.

Tourient's content management system builds genuinely useful AI tools directly into the tour-editing workflow, so these tasks take minutes instead of days.

Text Translation

If your visitors speak more than one language, you already know how much time it takes to create translations: export text, send it out, wait, reformat, re-import, and repeat every time you make an edit.

Tourient's built-in translation tool handles this inside the CMS. Translate a tour into any of the languages you need, and switch between them right in the editor to review. When you update the original text, updating the translations happens in just a few clicks.

Text-to-Speech Audio

Not every tour has the budget (or the time) for professional voice actors or audio recording. Tourient's built-in text-to-speech tool, powered by ElevenLabs, turns your written text into narration, with voices selectable by gender, accent, and other attributes. Generate the audio, drop it into your stop, and you're done.

The voice-selection UX is currently being rebuilt to give you finer control over picking the voice that fits your tour best.

Need something more distinctive? Tourient can also help create custom voice models, including voices modeled on real local or historical figures, for a more memorable narration experience.

And you can generate narrated audio in the languages you've translated text for, too.

Convert audio to a transcript

Sometimes the process runs the other direction: you've got existing audio tracks, and you need the text. Tourient's audio-to-transcript tool converts spoken audio into text in just one click, so you can turn recordings you have on hand into accessible transcripts or reusable tour copy without spending hours transcribing by hand.

ALT text generation

Alt text is essential for an accessible tour app, and can be tedious to write at scale. Tourient generates alt text from any image in a single click, saving hours of manual writing. Competing platforms like STQRY and Cuseum don't offer this.

On the Roadmap: Accessibility & Publishing Check

Coming soon: an accessibility and publishing check tool will scan your tours before you publish, checking readability and SEO, confirming audio and transcripts exist, and verifying ALT text coverage, so you can catch compliance gaps before visitors do.

How It Compares

Both STQRY and Cuseum also offer AI features, but the quality of the tools differ:

Feature

Tourient

STQRY

Cuseum

Text translation

Built-in, in-CMS, 73+ languages

Built-in, in-CMS, 50+ languages

Built-in AI translation in the CMS

Text-to-speech

Built-in (ElevenLabs), voice picker, custom/historical voice models

Built-in (Amazon Polly)

Built-in AI text-to-speech (Amazon Polly), converts any app text to audio

Audio-to-transcript

Built-in

Not yet released

Not offered

Alt text generation

Built-in, one click

Not yet released

Not offered

Accessibility/publish check

On the roadmap

Not offered

Not offered

Dev/workflow integration

Not offered

Studio Connect (CLI, Claude & Codex skills)

Not offered

All three major platforms build translation and text-to-speech into the CMS. Where Tourient pulls ahead is breadth of useful tools: audio-to-transcript and ALT text generation are built in and available today (not just planned features). Tourient uses ElevenLabs as their text-to-speech provider, which yields more realistic sounding audio, while STQRY and Cuseum use Amazon Polly. STQRY offers a CLI, but the real-world use cases of that for most organizations is limited. Cuseum's AI tools are basic, and stop at translation and text-to-speech.

Every tool in Tourient is opt-in

Many platforms put AI where it doesn't belong, and we're committed to only building AI tools that genuinely improve the tour building experience. None of these tools are mandatory, and organizations can opt out of AI usage entirely at an account level. Use as many or as few of these tools as you like.

Why it's built in

The common thread across all of these tools is that none of them require leaving the Tourient CMS. No exporting content to a third-party translator, no separate transcription service, no juggling files between tools. Everything lives in the CMS, which streamlines your workflow and makes building a tour in Tourient as straightforward as possible.

Book a demo or start a 14-day free trial to give these tools a try for yourself.

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April 18th, 2024