GrandTour

Grand Tour: Local Audio

Grand Tour is a free, open-source app for place-tied audio. You can use it to listen to audio tours, and much more:

  • Record your own tours or local memories, for family, friends or the public
  • Have AI generate tours for you, on any topic you like
  • Use it to study, tying places to topics in a memory palace
  • Make an audio scavenger hunt
  • Learn about local shops, restaurants, museums, etc.
  • Hear about upcoming events or recent news at the places you pass
  • Take a real estate tour of an area, listening to previous sales and community highlights

Learn about the geology of your area as you walk over it, or narrate a coffee-focused tour of your neighborhood to share with friends. Let tracks play as you go about your daily life, or follow a pre-determined walking or driving route to hear a linear story laid out in space.

Try it

The phone on the right is the web version of the app. You can click around and find spots to listen to, or do a demo drive of a track.

When you're out on the move, you can open the app and your location is used to trigger nearby narration.

Right now, there's not much content. A handful of public-domain tours from the US National Parks Service and a bunch of AI-generated spots for Marin County, California. I'm hoping you'll build the content you want to hear.

Privacy

The web and iOS apps can use location determine which spots to play for you. Your location never gets sent to a Grand Tour server, and you can connect to any server you like, including one you run locally.

Creating tracks and spots

Use the web admin interface (you need to run this yourself locally) to create tracks and spots from your computer, or take a walk and narrate as you go. You can run your own server to send the content to, or export it from the iOS app.

For AI-generated content, use the Grand Tour agent skill to create anything you can dream up.

Serving

A Grand Tour server just serves static content. Anything that serves a grandtour.json index and the tracks it names is a GrandTour server: this site, a GitHub repository, or your own machine. You can source your tracks from anywhere you like.

Coming soon

  • App in the iOS App store (you can build and load the app yourself for now with a developer account)
  • Android version
  • CarPlay app
  • Apple Watch app
  • Central hub for finding and downloading / streaming tracks and spots

Development

GrandTour is released under the MIT license and is free to use and modify. gtfyi/grandtour.

It's completely vibe-coded at the moment and fairly janky, but usable. Bug reports and feature requests appreciated as issues.

The published tracks live in gtfyi/content, which is itself a GrandTour server: point the app at github.com/gtfyi/content and it plays them from there.