FAQ

guidemate is a platform for audio guides and audio walks to which anyone can contribute content.

Here you will find artistic audio walks by theaters and sound walks by sound artists. Schools and universities publish their productions from educational projects. Museums offer their audio guides. Tourist information centers invite you to take an acoustic tour of the city. Tour guides turn their city tours into audio walks, shipping companies play their audio tours via guidemate. Some travel providers create complete acoustic travel guides for entire countries.

Do you know your city, your neighborhood or your region? Then talk about it! Whether it's about architecture, sights, nature, culture, gastronomy or hiking trails - publishing your own audio guides is easy! The platform aims to encourage diversity and different approaches to creating guides.

We thought it was a shame that city exploration in many places was limited to sightseeing tours with tourist groups or hop-on/hop-off buses. We wanted to increase the variety of offers in city tourism. In addition to classic city tours, there are many other ways to get to know a place, immerse yourself in its history and experience its stories. For many people, it is important to be flexible in terms of time and to be able to travel at their own pace, independent of set start times and sometimes challenging group speeds.

Audio tours have long been established in museums and galleries. The rental of portable and often clunky audio guides presented more and more institutions with personnel and financial challenges. So what could be more obvious than using the guests' own smartphones?

When we founded guidemate, the audio walk as an art genre in its own right was still a niche phenomenon. It is now part of the repertoire of numerous theaters and has become a popular program item at art festivals.

Since the early days of guidemate, schools have repeatedly used our platform for audio walks that were created in class. At universities, sound walks have become both an object and a means of artistic research.

After all, there are simply many people who have an idea for an audio walk themselves, who are familiar with their own city, who are passionate about a topic and want to work on it in a location-specific way, who are keen to combine sound and walking.

Guidemate wants to support all these institutions and private individuals professionally and provide the technical infrastructure with its platform.

With guidemate, your audio walk can be played in a location-specific way. Listeners follow the map on the display of their smartphone. And they can even leave their smartphone in their pocket if they choose to play the content automatically. The next chapter of an audio tour then starts automatically as soon as you approach the location to which the chapter refers.

With guidemate, your audio walk is played on every conceivable channel: There's the smartphone app for iOS and Android. And there is the web application, which runs in the internet browser without any installation. Listeners can decide for themselves how they want to receive the audio tour.

You can even integrate your tour into your own website: With our interactive widget, you can easily integrate it into your homepage so that your audience doesn't even have to open another website for the audio walk.

Your audio walk has its own landing page. And you can create your own QR codes for the whole tour and for each track.

If you want, you can even personalize the guidemate web app with your own logo and the colors of your choice. And if you need your own smartphone app as a white-label solution, you've also come to the right place.

On guidemate, your audio walk is in good company with hundreds of other audio walks in over 25 countries. The audio tours on guidemate are accessed many hundreds of thousands times a year. Because so many people use guidemate, your tour also receives public attention that you could hardly achieve on your own.

With guidemate you have found a partner who is keen to collect as little data as possible. We do not use external tracking. Our servers are located in the EU. And they are powered by green electricity. Guidemate does not advertise or sell data.

You can publish free and paid audio tours on guidemate. The paid ones are displayed like all other walks, but the tracks can only be listened to in full after payment. You can find the exact conditions in the prices and conditions.

The platform is financed by:

• Commissions for paid audio guides
• Fees for setting up free audio walks
• Adapted versions of the guidemate apps for professional audio guide providers
• The production of audio walks

We do not place any advertising on the website or in the apps.

Membership in the guidemate community, the website and the apps are free and will remain so.

We charge a service fee for publishing audio tours that are intended to be free for the public. You can find details in the prices and conditions.

Audio walks on guidemate are partly free and partly chargeable - this is determined by the respective provider. With a paid audio tour, you can only listen to the stations in full after paying.

For example, with your help! Give feedback, write comments on audio walks. And give a heart if you liked a tour. The audio tours that are best rated by the community are given priority.

We may delete a tour after extensive revision if it contains content that contradicts applicable law or does not fit with our idea of a solidarity-based and diverse society.

We cannot guarantee that there will not be a bad or inappropriate audio guide occasionally.

We are based in Berlin, so our focus was on German audio walks initially.

However, there are many walks in English and several other languages now.

The general texts in the apps and on the website are available in German and English.

For the iPhone and for Android devices there are guidemate apps, with which you can listen to audio walks and view them on the map. You can also download complete audio tours to use them offline. In the apps you can use the AutoPlay function to automatically play stations as you approach.

You can also simply listen to the audio walks via the website if the mobile connection is good locally or there is WiFi.

You can also save the audio files locally on your cell phone, computer or MP3 player. To do this, click on the download arrow in the guide details.

In the iPhone app or the Android app, click on "Download" in the guide details. All audio data and images belonging to the audio tour will then be downloaded and saved on the device. You can also download the map data if you want, so that you can use the audio walk completely offline.

After you have registered on guidemate.com, you can get started right away under "My Guides". Our Guide to the Guide will help you if you have any problems. You will also find hints about creating a good audio walk there.

Additionally, we have created the tutorial How To Audio Walk together with Soundmarker, the laboratory for location-based audio work, and Kulturkosmos Leipzig e.V., in which you will find lots of suggestions (though only in German currently).

Not really. In the simplest case, you use your computer's internal microphone or a headset.

Of course, good audio equipment is beneficial. But what you have to say is much more important. You can find more detailed instructions and hints on what to look out for when creating it in our Guide to Guide and in the tutorial How To Hörspaziergang (in German only).