For the hours between the places you planned
You plan the stops. Nobody plans the road between them. Guideling follows the road ahead and tells you about what's coming up and what you'll actually be able to see, while it's still out of the window. Nothing to tap, at any speed.
"What was that?" "No idea."
A ruin on a hill, an odd bridge, a village with an obviously old church, gone in nine seconds. The driver can't look it up and shouldn't. A passenger searching on a phone is looking at a phone. A guidebook covers the places you stop and says nothing about the road. An audio tour needs you on its route, at its pace.
Guideling starts talking before you get there, so the answer arrives while the thing is still in view.
What an hour sounds like
It talks for a third of the time at most, with at least half a minute between stories, so an hour of motorway isn't an hour of talking. Roughly:
| Where you are | What it says |
|---|---|
| Leaving town | Why the town is where it is: a ford, a junction, a mine that closed. |
| A landmark on the ridge | A sentence or two, starting a kilometre out, finished before you're level with it. |
| Twelve minutes of nothing | Nothing. |
| Crossing a river | The bridge, who built it, and what the river meant to the towns on either side. |
| Open country | The landscape itself: the ice that flattened it, the border that used to run through it. |
| Approaching a city | Shorter stories, closer together, because at 50 km/h you pass things sooner. |
On a long drive
Load the route before you leave. Give it your destination on the hotel Wi-Fi and it fetches the whole road in one go, so mountain passes and tunnels don't matter.
Everyone in the car hears it. It plays through the car speakers and turns your music down while it talks, rather than stopping it.
It stays out of your map's way. Guideling never speaks directions. When a turn instruction is due, it waits.
One button stops it. Press Silence and the current story ends and the next ones wait until you say otherwise.
What drivers ask
Is there an app that tells you about places while you drive?
That's what Guideling does. It follows the road ahead, works out which places you're about to pass and which you'll be able to see, and says a sentence or two about each one, finishing before you draw level. There's nothing to tap.
Will it work on a road trip route I have not planned?
Yes. It needs no itinerary. It reads the road you're on and keeps predicting the next few kilometres, so a wrong turn or a detour costs nothing. A destination is optional and only helps it load stories further ahead.
Does everyone in the car hear it?
Yes. It plays through the car speakers like any other audio and turns your music down while it talks, rather than stopping it.
Will it keep talking through a long boring stretch?
It will have something to say, but not constantly. On an empty road it talks about the country itself: the geology, why the farms are laid out that way, what the road replaced. It still talks for a third of the drive at most.
Does it work with Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze?
Yes, with any of them. Guideling never speaks directions, so there's no conflict. Keep the map you use and Guideling talks in the gaps.
What about tunnels and areas with no signal?
It fetches the stories and their recordings several minutes ahead of you, so losing signal in a tunnel or on a mountain pass doesn't interrupt it.
Does it work in CarPlay?
Not on the car screen yet: that needs Apple's approval, which it doesn't have. The sound plays through CarPlay like any other app's.
How the timing works · The same thing on foot · Compared with audio tours · Pricing
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