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ABOUT US

Curiously human self-guided tours

VoiceMap's audio tours help you find your feet somewhere new, or rediscover familiar stomping grounds, close to home. They're an invitation to travel more meaningfully too – in ways that are more curious and more human than AI-generated itineraries and influencer bucket lists.

We offer over 2,000 tours across the world, in hundreds of destinations, and there's a new self-guided walk or drive every day, along with a growing collection of audio guides for museums, galleries and archeological sites. All of them are produced with a focus on quality and consistency, and you'll find this reflected in close to 100,000 ratings that average 4.6 out of 5 stars. You can drill down into these too, to find the tours that best capture a sense of place, follow a surprising route, include the clearest turn-by-turn navigation, or offer information that goes into the greatest depth.

Our mobile app

VoiceMap's app for iOS and Android has been downloaded millions of times, and over the last 12 years, it's collected thousands of five star reviews. If you look though them, you'll see the same thing mentioned again and again: the opportunity to explore at your own pace instead of being herded along in a group.

All you have to do is go to your tour's starting point, then tap on Start. You'll get turn-by-turn directions along with storytelling that plays automatically outdoors, using GPS. The app works offline too, so you don't have to worry about roaming fees or signal that drops out down narrow alleys and backcountry roads. You can stop tours whenever you like, to grab a drink or take in the view, then tap Resume to pick up exactly where you left off.

See the full feature set
VoiceMap mobile app on iPhone

Mapmaker

Mapmaker is our content management system. It was built from scratch for self-guided audio tours, and it handles fiddly things like matching travel time to audio time, or testing tours with scratch audio, which normally require time-consuming trial and error. It's also built for collaboration, and it connects you to our team of script editors and sound engineers – with experience across thousands of self-guided tours – using inline comments, tracked changes and email notifications.

Start a new tour
Mapmaker editor on a MacBook

Our community of publishers

There's a community of close to 1,000 publishers behind every one of our self-guided tours. They're podcasters and passionate locals, licensed tour guides and PhD-level historians, architects and retired intelligence analysts. There are a few celebrities too, including Ian McKellen and Sir Stephen Fry, as well as some celebrated institutions, like the Daily Show, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the University of Cambridge.

Official London Mark Johnson County TellBetter Annie Table Mountain Marija Cynthia City Walks Krakow Yohanna
Meet the community

Our

journey

so far

VoiceMap was founded by Iain Manley in February 2014, after an overland journey from London to Shanghai convinced him that the most memorable stories about a place are the small, personal ones locals tell at street level – exactly the kind of stories that come alive when GPS plays them in the right spot.

The first tour was a Bangkok ferry ride along the Chao Phraya called River of Kings. Two years later, we published our first celebrity tour: a free walk through London's Theatreland with Sir Ian McKellen, in partnership with the Society of London Theatre. Other publishers followed – podcasters and historians, journalists and licensed tour guides from cities across Europe, North America and Asia.

In 2022, the Daily Show with Trevor Noah joined us with a walk through Washington, DC retracing the January 6th insurrection. The following year, the San Francisco Chronicle launched three tours by their journalists – a project shortlisted for an INMA Global Media Award – and we published our 1,000th tour on VoiceMap's 9th birthday. We ventured indoors in April 2024 with an audio guide to the Vatican Museums, produced with Context Travel. The University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory joined us in 2025, to celebrate its 150th anniversary.

Itchy feet? Us too
VoiceMap’s newsletter scratches that itch and stimulates your senses, every fortnight. Curiosity is the only currency you need to subscribe.