I quit corporate, moved to the Himalayas, and I'm building an AI audio tour app - here's why
A few years ago I was climbing the corporate ladder with an MBA in Marketing. Today I run Resort Blue Lotus in Uttarakhand's Himalayan foothills and I'm building VoiceRoam.
Here's what triggered it.
I've traveled across Asia and Africa extensively. Every single time, the guide experience was the same: expensive, rigid schedules, identical scripts for 30 strangers. I wasn't experiencing a place, I was being processed through it.
Back at my resort, traveler after traveler said the same thing. Different continents, same frustration.
So I started building.
VoiceRoam is AI-powered self-guided audio tours for explorers.
Triggers at landmarks automatically
Choose your style: Story, Deep Dive, or Unfiltered
Ask anything in real time with Q&A that goes beyond guidebooks
Works fully offline, in 5 languages
Built for history buffs, culture lovers, adventure seekers
No fixed schedules. No identical scripts. No overpriced guides.
We're launching Spain first - Barcelona, Madrid, Granada and more. Beta drops soon and I'm looking for 50 curious explorers to test it on location. Test free audio tours across Spain and get 3 free tours when the app goes live
Non-tech solo founder building this from the mountains of India. Happy to answer anything, brutal feedback welcome.
Join the waitlist here: VoiceRoam
launching where there's already existing audio guide behavior is smart, you're not creating a new category, just replacing a worse version of something people already pay for. for early traction i'd think about partnering with a few hostels or boutique hotels in barcelona that already recommend walking routes to guests. you'd get a warm intro to exactly your target user and real feedback on whether the AI narratives hold up vs what a local would actually tell you. the offline piece is massive too, anyone who's tried using maps in a smaller spanish town knows how unreliable signal gets outside the main tourist zones. are you planning to charge per city or go subscription?
Yes, hostels and boutique stays are exactly where I'm focusing. Cold email is still finding its feet but the hostel angle feels right, the guest is already in exploration mode the moment they check in, so it's a warm handoff rather than convincing someone from scratch. On the AI narrative side, the goal is to make it feel like a well-travelled friend talking, not a Wikipedia article with background music. Each tour gets you to actually look around, notice specific things, and there are local secrets layered in that most guides skip entirely. Three versions per site: story mode, unfiltered (with the controversial stories) and deep dive is what i'm keeping. For pricing I'm going with three tiers. Pay per tour for casual users, a Marco Polo pass for 7–8 tours covering a single trip, and a Columbus pass for 25–30 tours aimed at longer stays or frequent travelers. Keeps it flexible without forcing everyone into a subscription. The offline point is a good one, smaller Spanish towns outside the main zones are a strong use case I should be shouting about more. Appreciated.
Fellow India-based founder here building in voice AI — this resonates hard. The frustration you described with rigid tour guides is basically the same problem we see with rigid website interfaces. People want to talk, not tap through menus.
The offline-first approach for 5 languages is really smart for your use case. Connectivity in most historic sites (even in Spain) is terrible — I've seen tourists in Rajasthan forts completely lose signal. That's a genuine moat if you nail the offline experience.
One thing from our experience building AnveVoice (voice AI for websites): the language piece gets exponentially harder after ~10 languages. STT accuracy drops significantly for less-resourced languages. Since you're launching Spain first, have you considered Catalan and Basque alongside Spanish? Those communities are passionate about their languages and it could be a strong differentiator vs. generic audio guides.
Also curious about your content generation approach — are you using AI to generate the tour narratives, or curating from local historians? We've found that AI-generated content works great for structured tasks but local cultural nuance still needs human input. The "Unfiltered" style option you mentioned sounds interesting for that.
How are you handling the non-tech founder challenge with the AI/ML stack? Building voice pipelines without a technical background is no joke.
Nice to meet a fellow founder in the same space.vVoice absolutely changes the UX, people want to talk, not tap through menus, and that’s exactly what we’re building toward.
On the offline piece, we’re nailing it as hard as we can so the experience never breaks, even in the worst signal conditions. Those Rajasthan fort examples are spot on and that’s the exact problem we’re solving for.
Good call on the language angle. For now we’re sticking to the most commonly spoken languages in Spain that together cover 95%+ of visitors, this is different from the 4 foreign languages. Less-resourced languages risk hurting accuracy and overall UX, even if they’re a nice differentiator. We’ll keep that in mind as we scale.
The narratives are AI-generated, but we’ve got a team with strong AI and prompt engineering backgrounds. Each prompt is highly detailed, runs sequentially, and captures local nuance, tone, and sensitivities. A single script takes around 15 minutes to generate, so you can imagine how deep the prompts go.
On the technical side, I’ve got a friend with a background in AI and app development helping with the voice pipelines and overall architecture. It’s not trivial, but having that support makes it doable.
Thanks for the insights, the language piece especially is something I’ll keep circling back to as we iterate.
Starting with Spain is a smart call. High tourist volume, tons of walkable historic areas, and people are already used to audio guides at places like the Alhambra or Sagrada Familia. You're competing with those rigid 8-euro audio guide rentals that haven't changed in 20 years. One thing I'd push on: the offline part is huge and you should lead with it harder. Anyone who's tried using Google Maps in a rural Spanish town knows how spotty coverage gets outside major cities. If your tours actually work without signal in places like the Albaicin or smaller pueblos, that's a genuine differentiator. Curious about the content side though. Are you generating the tour narratives entirely with AI, or curating them with local input? The "Unfiltered" style option sounds interesting but I'd worry about hallucinated history if it's purely AI-generated. Tourists in Granada don't need a confidently wrong story about the Nasrid dynasty. Cool project. The guide frustration is real and I say that as someone living in Spain who's watched plenty of tourist groups shuffle past interesting spots because the guide was running on a schedule.
Genuinely appreciate this and I'll be honest, early stage is full of second-guessing and hearing someone who lives in Spain validate the direction does help more than I expected. You're spot on about the official guide sites. I'm deliberately staying away from places like the Alhambra and Sagrada Família for now. Tourists there already get an official version at the ticket counter and trust it for authenticity, and competing with that is a losing game. Interestingly, most competitors avoid those sites too, which told me something. VoiceRoam lives in the walkable neighbourhoods, the Albaicin, the streets between the famous spots, the smaller pueblos where signal dies and no official guide follows you. That's where the offline piece becomes a genuine differentiator and I'm going to push harder on that in the messaging, so thank you for that nudge. On the AI side, every script goes through us before it's live. We read, sanitise, and cross-check across multiple historical perspectives before anything goes into the app. For the Unfiltered version specifically, we flag sensitive content before it plays and we're building in checks to catch hallucinations early. No plans for local researchers right now as we want to scale lean, keep cost optimized and reduce dependencies but we're constantly iterating on how close AI can get to that local feel.
Your last line about tourists shuffling past interesting spots because the guide was on a schedule, that's actually going into my notes as a line I want to use somewhere. Thank you for that.
Quitting corporate to build something specific to a place you actually know is a genuinely good starting point. You have context no remote founder could fake. The question I would be asking is whether the people who want AI audio tours are the same people who travel to the Himalayas - or whether this works better as a global product that just happens to start there.
Thanks, appreciate that. I’m based in the mountains right now building this from my resort, and I’ve traveled extensively across Asia and Africa, so there’s definitely overlap between the people who seek out places like the Himalayas and the kind of traveler who digs deep into a city’s real history. Same curiosity, just different landscapes. You’re absolutely right that this is a global product at its core. We’re launching in Spain first because the timeline lines up with their shoulder and peak season, plus the footfall is high with a strong mix of young, budget-minded solo travelers. The model is the same, just scaling the approach globally once it’s locked in Spain.
Fellow travelers on IH, what's the single worst guided tour experience you've ever had? I'll start: mine was at Egypt where it was difficult to understand the accent, was rushed through with constant pressure of tipping.
Also, would you pay for this? Honest answers only, even a hard no helps me build better."