Touring - The ultimate app for travellers, works literally everywhere

Ever felt like you’re missing out while traveling? Touring scans your surroundings to reveal main attractions and hidden gems. You immediately get high-quality, factual content so you can feel enriched by your trip. Works everywhere in the WORLD. No kidding.

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For those new to Touring - a little backstory: In November 2023, we launched the initial concept for Touring here on Product Hunt, reaching 2nd Product of the Day. The overwhelming response from this community motivated us to dedicate several months to creating a powerful product for the modern traveler. With continuous testing and iterations involving over 1,000 early adopters, we are now ready to take the next step in our journey! 🎉 Today, we are excited to release Touring for both iOS and Android. Download it now and add it to your to-do list for your next trip! In short, what does Touring do? ✍️ Touring scans your surroundings and creates insightful, immersive stories in seconds, thanks to a highly optimized pipeline we’ve been refining for months. This ensures that you receive accurate, engaging, and up-to-date content wherever you are. 🎧 You can read or listen to these stories, and we currently support 30+ languages! Exciting Features on the Horizon Our roadmap includes many more features set to be released in the coming months. Here a few examples of what we're working on as we speak: • On-demand Search: Discover what lies beyond with ease, and plan your next stop. • Curated Explorations: Embark on journeys crafted just for you. • Interactive Chat: Chat with Touring to ask follow-up questions or other queries about the places. • Hands-free Mode: Navigate and learn about your surroundings effortlessly. 🦫 P.S. many of you asked us about our mascot, the capybara. We could go on and on about the reasons why a capybara is the perfect mascot for Touring, but the ultimate explanation is also the simplest: the Touring team finds them incredibly cute. 🔔🔔 Where will you try Touring? Comment on this launch with the first place that comes to mind when thinking about trying Touring! We're super curious to hear about all your explorations! ----------- A personal note: I am so grateful for the support we've been receiving from this community. Since the launch in November23, I got in contact with several people who actively helped us evolve Touring. This would not have been possible without you. I sincerely hope Touring will make you create better memories of the places you travel to, and that it will become the app you know you can rely on, no matter where you're going. We ourselves love to travel and find out all the interesting stories hiding behind the buildings and hidden gems of the beautiful places this world has to offer. I hope you enjoy! And please do comment with any feedback! 🙏
@julia_zakharova2 Uhhh, nice! Curious to see what Touring will craft for your when you're there! 💪
German Syroezhkin
This app sounds fantastic for spontaneous travelers! What inspired you to incorporate the different LLMs like gemma, llama, and mixtral in the story generation pipeline, @gabriele_mazzola?
@laocool Mostly different requirements in terms of the latency that they introduce. Also, we experimented a lot with different models and different prompts, and some of them were outputting - in our opinion - better output for some parts of the pipeline, but worse in others. So that's why we ended up using different ones. I'd say, if openai made gpt4o 10x faster, let's say, we could probably build the whole LLM pipeline on that, and adapt the prompts to it. But right now, that would mean making users wait minutes to enjoy a story.
Swarna Hebbar
Hey @gabriele_mazzola congratulations on your launch! This app looks great- definitely something I'll use the next time I travel 🤙
@swarna_hebb Hey thank you so much!! Looking forward to hearing how you found it then!
Shridhar Kamathe
This is amazing! Definitely going to try as Google doesn't really help much nowadays. Is there an option where we could add locations and kind of control how many people can see it?
@shridhar_kamathe Hey thanks for the comment! Could you elaborate a bit more on the "adding location" feature? I'd like to better understand what you mean :)
Shridhar Kamathe
@gabriele_mazzola "adding location" as in suppose I'm roaming around in a city or a town and I come across a place or an activity which I would want others to experience as well, so I wish to add.
@shridhar_kamathe Ah I see, like a collaborative editing of the places. We have something like this in the roadmap but not currently planned in the near future! We were thinking of a "flag missing place" feature on the map where you can simply notify us with some quick explanation, and the team would then investigate the reason why the place is not there. The end goal is to have an AI that automatically finds all the places that are interesting for a traveller, and we want to put all the effort on the AI and let the users simply enjoy the stories!
Bogomil Shopov - Бого
Does it work offline as well? Have you considered using openstreetmap instead of what you currently use (or add the option as a selection)?
@bogomep Good point! We totally thought about offline mode, and it's on our radar. The difficult part is that - currently - Touring builds everything in real-time based on your surroundings, so it would be quite difficult to do it beforehand. But of course, it can be done, and if we see that a lot of users are in need of that, we'll focus our effort on that! On OSM, we're currently working on integrating it in the backend to enrich the offering of the points of interest shown in Touring!
Bogomil Shopov - Бого
@gabriele_mazzola on OSM - nice. Let me get back to adding and fixing more POI then :) for the offline - i understand. Will give it a proper try when I am traveling!
@bogomep Thank you so much! Looking forward to hearing from you after you've tried it!
Daniel S
I think this is a wonderful product. Do you craft the stories by hand or use AI to generate them? There is so much potential to grow functionality and also revenue streams for you, such as a partnership program with local businesses to be integrated as part of the future feature "Curated Explorations". This way the user can receive a discount, to lets say a souvenir shop or a cafe, and the shop gets more visitors while you charge a small commission. You can even integrate with services like OpenTable to prebook meals for users on a tour!
@dan16 Thank you so much for the comment, Daniel! In Touring, nothing is done by hand. That has been priority number one in our development, because it's the only way to make it scale automatically on a global level. I love your ideas, and those are all things that we will look into, but only after having proven that there is Product Market Fit for this product and that we can reach a big enough user base that would justify that kind of monetisation
Daniel S
@gabriele_mazzola that’s awesome that you can leave content to AI and focus on features. And yes the strategy makes total sense 🙂
Ksenia Meshkova
OMG, the cutest logo:) In the last few minutes after downloading this app, I've learned more about my apartment's surroundings than I have in the last six months) Break a leg!
Emanuele Fabbiani
I have tried it in many places across Europe. I'm not reading Wikipedia while walking anymore!
@donlelef Glad to hear that!
Ingo Schabby
I had the idea to built a gpt like that but TOURING was faster and better. Congrats
@ingo_schabby Hey Ingo, thanks for the appreciation!! You're right, a lot of our work has gone into optimising the pipeline for the generation of the stories so much that could be used in real-time as you explore, but maintaining a high level of content quality! Thank you so much!
Simone Colucci
Can't wait to know what you guys think of this new version ❤️
Khyati Bardolia
I just checked out your mobile app, and it's absolutely stunning! Touring is such a fantastic idea. I've definitely felt like I'm missing out while traveling before. The ability to scan surroundings and instantly discover main attractions and hidden gems is a game-changer. Plus, getting high-quality, factual content immediately is exactly what travelers need to feel enriched by their trips. The fact that it works everywhere in the world is just amazing. Congratulations to you and the team on this fantastic launch! Keep up the amazing work! ❤️
@khyati_bardolia Thank you so much, khyati! We're super happy you liked it! May Touring be your go-to choice for your future trips!
Darya Skorokhod
Love new updates and where the app is going! Congrats on the launch, Gabriele 🔥
@darya_skd Thank you so much, Darya!! Really appreciate it!
Namrata Arya
This is AWESOME! Im definitely going to use this on my next vacation!
@namrata_arya Thank you so much! Let us know if it works well when you try it for real :)))
Julia Suontama
If there is a team to win here, it is Gabriele & co.! Good luck, upwards and onwards 💯💪🏼
@juliasuontama Hey Julia!! Thank you so much for the kind words, I appreciate it!
Dania Husen
Congratulations on the re-launch🤩 Besides its cute logo, Touring is a unique breakthrough for travelers like me. Excited to use this app when I go on vacation. Keep it up, team!
@dania_husen Thank you so much, Dania!! Messages like this is what keeps the motivation up! Please, do reach out with feedback once you've tried in on vacation 🙏 it'll be gold for us!
André J
Did you implement chatgpt 4o ? Should be perfect for this right?
@sentry_co Do you mean integrating gpt4o in the story generation pipeline? For some parts of it it's used, but can't handle all of it, otherwise users would have to wait possibly more than a minute to access a story. So right now we're mixing A LOT of different LLMs (gemma, llama, gpt 3/4, and mixtral) to try and balance their speed and complexity in the different aspect of the pipeline
André J
@gabriele_mazzola I really like how gpt4o can keep the AI convo going with the phone being in standby. I could imagine Touring like that. You just walk around and just talk with touring via your EarPods. discreet, and you can focus on all the scenery. And have Scarlet Johansen in your ear guiding you. 😬 I watched the movie "Her" too many times 🤦
Philip Hoheisel
Best wishes for you launch!
@phoheisel Thanks, Philip! (and sorry for the duplicated emails 🙏)
Nevena Sofranic
Wow, that's huge! Congrats, you're moving so fast.
@nevena_sofranic Thank you so much Nevena! Yeaaah, we've been fully focused on it since the launch in November 🚀
Filippo Calabrese
💎 Pixel perfection
I took it for a spin! In general, the UX/UI is really well done. Congratulations! There is just enough information and no unnecessary frills. The pricing model is also great! Perfect for those who are on holiday for a couple of days and don't want to take out yet another monthly or annual subscription. One note: The generation of stories is a bit slow, but only at times. This morning it took about 20 seconds, while now it was almost instantaneous. I imagine that there are technical elements behind it, but if you could find a way to standardise it a bit, it would really take things to another level. I can only congratulate you!
Anthony Latona
Definitely something to have handy whenever travelling. Congrats on the launch!
@anthony_latona Thank you so much, Anthony! Please let us know how it works when you try it on your next trip!