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Anyone comparing audio tour software for museums soon arrives at the same question: which choices decide how much work the tour will be later on? Seven points do that work: languages and translation management, branding, GPS, statistics, rights management, payments and who can change the tour later. Go through them before you request a demo and you’ll know exactly what to ask in every conversation.
How many languages can you support, and who manages the translations?
For museums, multiple languages are rarely an extra. German day-trippers, a school class with pupils who speak other languages, an English-speaking group: it all happens in the same week. So the first question is how many languages a platform supports. The second is more interesting: who looks after the translation after that?
Automatic translation gets you a long way quickly. But a museum has its own terms: the name of a gallery, a donor, the title of a work. If you can’t fine-tune that translation yourself, you’re stuck with the machine’s choice. So press every provider on two points: can you still edit a translated text by hand, and does that edit stay when you change the source text later?
Wandrz translates tours automatically into more than 70 languages and lets you edit those translations. The voice follows suit: text-to-speech with AI voices in every language you choose, so you don’t have to find a voice actor for each language.
Does the tour stay in your own branding?
Visitors step from your entrance straight into the tour. If a strange logo and an unfamiliar colour then appear on screen, the spell is broken. So when you compare, look at what you can really set yourself: colours, logo, typography. And check whether that carries through the whole tour or only the start screen.
With Wandrz, the tour fits your organisation’s own branding completely. It stays the museum’s story, not the supplier’s.
Does the tour play by itself on location?
GPS triggers start a clip automatically as soon as someone is in the right spot. On a city walk or an outdoor route, that saves visitors a lot of hunting for numbers. Inside a museum things are different; there, the building and the layout of your galleries decide what works.
Ask each provider how clips can be started and whether you place and move those triggers yourself. With Wandrz, GPS triggers play clips automatically on location.
Which statistics do you get back?
A live tour tells you things: how many people started, where they stop, which language is chosen most. Those figures help with the next version: shortening a clip, giving a gallery a better introduction, adding a language.
So find out what you can see on the management side and whether you can export those figures for an annual report or a funding application. Wandrz has management and statistics built into the platform.
What about rights, and the rights to your materials?
A tour is full of other people’s material: a photographer’s image, a clip from an archive, music under an intro. Two questions belong in every comparison conversation.
First: can you record for each item where it comes from and which rights apply, so you can look up later what you may use from whom? And then the question that often gets left: who owns the tour if you move to another supplier? Ask about the texts, the audio files and the translations.
Can you sell a tour?
Some museums give the tour away as part of the admission ticket. Others sell it separately, or offer a free taster with a paid follow-up. If paying needs to be an option, it belongs in your selection criteria: which payment methods does the platform support, can you offer single tours or bundles, and how does the money reach you?
With Wandrz you sell the tour at the front desk with a daily code or online through your own Mollie account. The revenue goes straight to you.
Who can change the tour next year?
This is the criterion that’s skipped most often, and in the long run it brings the most work or the most ease. A tour is never finished. A new gallery opens, a text turns out too long, an exhibition changes.
Ask yourself who makes that change. If the answer is “the supplier”, every change joins the queue and ends up on the invoice. If the answer is “a colleague from the visitor team”, you can put something right in an afternoon. So ask who logs in, whether you can give several people access and whether someone without a technical background can replace a clip.
Wandrz is an online platform where you put your tour together yourself: galleries, objects, text, images and video. Without technical hassle, and without depending on someone else for every change.
How to put the comparison on paper
Draw up a table with these seven points in the left-hand column and your providers along the top. Fill it in during the demo, not afterwards. Two things help: have a colleague who will manage the tour later sit in, and ask to see an existing tour from a similar organisation rather than just a presentation.
One last tip on the order. First pin down the criteria that are non-negotiable for your museum, usually languages and management, and only then compare the rest. Otherwise you end up choosing on a feature you’ll never use.
Want to know how Wandrz scores on these seven points for your museum? Request a demo and bring your own list of galleries.