We're very excited to introduce Marker Audio!
When we released ExploreHere 3.0 back in September, we didn't include any way to listen to markers. I wasn't really happy with the way ExploreHere 2.0 handled playing audio. It used the built in text-to-speech engine, which generated a low-quality robotic sound. It wasn't very pleasant to listen to. When we rebuilt ExploreHere, we weren't yet ready to tackle audio in the app; but, thanks to what we built over in ExploreHere | Audio Guide, we we're able to bring in audio stories to the app and this served as a solid foundation to start adding audio to Markers.
Text to speech engines have come a long way in the past 3 years - computed generated voices sound quite realistic and pleasant to listen to. But, with over 200k markers, it can get expensive to generate high-quality audio for every marker. Thanks to a few grants we got, we've been able to afford to generate high-quality audio for almost every marker in the database! Now you can listen to high-quality audio of over 190k markers in ExploreHere.
Audio markers are perfect for when you're wanting to use ExploreHere with more than one person - like on a family road trip, or in a group walking around a new city.
One downside of high-quality audio is it requires an internet connection to stream the audio over - making it hard to listen to stories in National Parks, or in places with bad signal. The work we've done in this release sets the foundation for future audio features we've been thinking about, including;
We'd love your feedback with marker audio, and are always looking to improve your adventures, so reach out to Jase or I, and we'd love to chat!
Wes
