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The cost of making an audio tour is hardly ever one amount. It’s made up of a few separate items: how many stops your tour has, how many languages you offer it in, who voices it, how much branding work is involved, how much time your own team spends on the texts and what the upkeep costs after launch. On this page we go through those items one by one, so you know which choices really drive your budget and which barely do. You’ll find Wandrz’s current rates on the pricing page.
What items make up the cost of an audio tour?
In short, a digital audio tour costs you:
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The platform you use to build and publish the tour (with Wandrz a subscription, see the pricing page).
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The number of stops or objects in the tour.
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The number of languages you offer the tour in.
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The choice of voice: automatic speech or a recorded narrator.
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Branding work: colours, logo and typography.
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Your own editing time for writing and checking the texts.
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Ongoing upkeep: keeping texts up to date, adding stops, looking at the statistics.
The first item is a fixed amount you know before you start. The items after it depend on your own choices, so that’s where your room to steer lies.
The number of stops: where your time goes
Each stop in your tour is a piece of text, perhaps with an image or video. You build them yourself in the browser, so you don’t pay anyone to add a stop. What a stop costs is the time it takes to work out what you want to say about it and write that down.
That’s why it’s smart to start with a tour that’s finished rather than complete. Ten well-written stops along the main route work better than forty half-done ones. You can always add more; you publish a new stop when its text is ready, without starting a new project.
Languages: the item that costs least and gives most
Offering several languages is often the most expensive choice when each language needs its own translation and its own recording. In the Wandrz platform you translate your tour automatically into more than 70 languages, and text-to-speech turns those translations into natural voices. So you don’t need a recording studio for each language.
What you do need to make room for is checking. The automatic translation can be edited, and with specialist terms, object names and place names in particular, you’ll want someone who knows the language to go over it once more. For your two or three main visitor languages, that’s worth the effort. For the rest, you can happily put the tour live and fine-tune it later if you notice a language is used a lot.
All languages are included in your subscription; what it costs is on the pricing page.
Choice of voice: automatic speech or a recorded narrator
This is where your budget splits most.
If you choose automatic text-to-speech, the voice is part of the platform. You type your text, choose a voice and have audio in every language you’ve chosen. If you change the text later, the new audio is there straight away; you don’t have to re-record anything. That saves money not just at the start, but above all with every change after that.
If you choose a recorded narrator, there are extra costs outside the platform. In that case, also allow for a longer lead time, and bear in mind that every text change means a new recording. For a tour that stays the same for years, that’s manageable. For a tour that changes with an exhibition, it adds up.
A middle way often works well: automatic speech for the whole tour, and a recorded narrator for the few clips that contain a personal story, an eyewitness account or a poem.
Branding work: colours, logo and typography
Your tour runs in your own branding: your colours, your logo, your typography. Setting that up is part of the platform, so no design agency is needed to make the tour match your brand.
What does take time is gathering the files. You need your logo in the right format, your colour codes and your fonts. For organisations with a brand manual, that’s a matter of looking them up. If you don’t have them to hand, allow half a day for someone who knows where they are.
Your own editing time: the biggest item that isn’t on the invoice
The item most organisations underestimate is their own hours. Someone has to decide on the route, write the text for each stop, keep an eye on the length and have the texts checked by a colleague or curator.
A few things that make that time shorter:
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Start from what’s already there. Gallery texts, leaflets, a tour a guide has been giving for years: that’s usable material, no substitute for editing but certainly a head start.
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Write for the ear. An audio clip of a minute and a half is enough for one thought. Shorter texts are quicker to write and visitors listen to them better.
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Make one person responsible for the final say. Texts that pass four people without anyone making the call take more time than the writing itself.
You don’t have to wait until everything is ready. You can publish with the stops that are finished and add the rest as soon as the text is there.
Ongoing upkeep: what comes after the launch
An audio tour is finished, and then it comes to life. An object moves, an exhibition changes, an opening time changes. In the platform you edit those texts yourself. The change is then ready in every language, with updated audio if you use automatic speech. As soon as you publish the new version, it goes live.
So upkeep is mostly a matter of time, not of varying costs per change. Set a regular moment for it, say an hour a quarter to go through the texts and see in the statistics which stops visitors actually listen to. Use what those statistics tell you in the next round: expand where visitors keep going, shorten where they drop off.
Where is there room to save?
If your budget is tight, the gains come in this order:
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Automatic speech instead of recordings. It saves at the start and with every change after that.
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Fewer stops, better written. You can always add more.
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Existing material as the basis. Gallery texts and guided tours give you a head start on a blank page.
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Checking only your main languages. You can fine-tune the other languages later, based on use.
Where you’d better not cut corners: editing your source text. Every translation comes from it, so a weak source text becomes a weak tour in every language.
Drawing up a budget for your tour
If you want to know what a tour costs in your situation, you need four answers: how many stops, how many languages, automatic speech or a recorded narrator, and who writes the texts on your side. With those four on paper, the rest is arithmetic.
The rates are on the pricing page. Not sure about the number of stops or the choice of voice? Talk us through your situation in a free consultation and we’ll go through the items that matter for you together.