Google has revealed an experimental travel feature called Talking ToursIt provides AI-generated commentary on over 50 locationsYou can try it out in the Google Arts & Culture app or website
Google made it pretty clear with its recent Google Maps upgrades that it wants to be your virtual tour guide – and a new Talking Tours experiment takes those ambitions to the next level.
Found in Google’s Arts & Culture app for iOS and Android (you can also try it online), the Talking Tours feature gives you AI-generated commentary on big landmarks for 55 locations around the world.
But what makes it feel like a glimpse of the future of walking tours is the ability to let you look around a 360-degree panorama, take a snap, and then have the AI feed you information about what’s in the scene.
Naturally, the audio guides are restricted to major tourist locations like the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. We tested it on one of London’s three locations and it did a solid, if fairly basic, job of filling us in on the scene around the London Eye.
For this “first experimentation”, Google says it worked with a “small selection of partners and cultural sites”, with “more to be added in the future”. But the use of AI-generated audio means it could potentially be scaled very quickly and become a handy free travel resource in the future – if Google doesn’t send it to the Google Graveyard.
Just add AR glasses
Our early tests with Talking Tours show it currently isn’t yet close to being a replacement for a real city walking tour guide – and likely won’t ever match the human touch or anecdotes of an experienced pro.
But it is also a glimpse of the kind of free travel advice that isn’t too far away. Combine a more advanced version of its AR-generated commentary with the smart glasses that the Google Play Store appears to be gearing up for and you could have a very useful, free city break assistant with knowledge of virtually anything you’re looking at.
In our quick play, the Talking Tours’ knowledge of the London Eye was fairly basic, but after we spun around to take a ‘snap’ (inside Street View) of the river, it recognized the boat and filled us in on the benefits of the city’s riverboat cruises.
Google has previously dabbled with offering city guides in the likes of Google Lens and Google Earth, but the combination of computer vision and AI-generated commentary means the feature is potentially far more scalable – and Talking Tours could be our first taste of that future.
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