History is everywhere: why we built an audio tour guide app

The first audio tour guide I ever used was at Carlsbad Caverns, sometime in the 1990s. It was a rental, and it was an upgrade, so you got one if your parents could spare the money for it. As I remember it, the device was a beige plastic box with wired headphones. You had a number at key parts of the cave and it told you about what you were looking at.

I have paid attention to technology since I was a kid, and that box impressed me. Nothing else on the trail could do what it did. A sign gives you the same paragraph it gives everyone, and you have to stand there and read it. The audio guide talked to you while you walked, and you could keep looking at the cave.

I noticed them after that. Every few years I would run into one in a museum and it would be smaller and lighter than the last one. The wired headphones went away. The keypad went away. Eventually the whole audio tour guide concept became an app you install on the phone you already have.

Audio guides stayed where the tickets are

The audio tour guide has been a museum technology from the beginning. I looked into it. The first one was installed at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1952, where the director had Philips build a device that broadcast pre-recorded lectures over closed-circuit shortwave radio to receivers visitors carried through the galleries. The National Gallery of Art in Washington followed in 1958, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1963. Seventy years later, the format is in the same buildings. You can still walk into the visitor center at Carlsbad Caverns and rent a handheld audio guide for the day.

There is a straightforward reason for that. An audio guide is expensive to make. Somebody has to research the site, write the script, hire a narrator, record the narration, and edit the result. That cost is only worth carrying if a large number of people are going to walk the same route past the same objects in the same order. A museum meets that condition. So does a national park. A county highway does not.

So audio guides were made for places where the tickets are sold, and everything outside of that is untold. That includes most of the history in the country.

The drive to Illinois

I did not think much about any of this outside of museums until 2017. My wife Anna and I were married with kids by then, and we started making the drive from Texas to Illinois about twice a year to see her side of the family.

One of the reasons I married her is that she is curious about the same things I am curious about. She would notice something out the window, look it up on her phone, and read out loud whatever she could find while I drove. It could be a town we were passing through, a rock formation, or an old building that caught her eye.

Somewhere on one of those drives I thought there should be an app for this. Then I spent most of the rest of the drive ruminating on the idea, working through how it would have to function, which is what I typically do with ideas.

The pieces existed. Google Maps already had everything marked. The problem was that everything marked meant everything: gas stations, dollar stores, and Taco Bell. What I wanted was a filter that stripped all of that out and left only the places worth knowing about. I wanted to know what happened in the small towns we were driving through. What was the industry that kept the place alive? I would see some burned trees and wonder what year the forest fire happened.

The brown signs

The historical markers bothered me the most.

If you drive in Texas you pass the brown signs constantly. Historical marker ahead. On the long empty stretches there is not much else to look at, so they get your attention, and then they are behind you. We usually could not stop. The kids were restless, or they were asleep and we were not going to risk it, or we needed to reach the hotel before dark so we could get dinner.

My wife would try to look them up afterward and it rarely worked. The sign tells you a marker exists. It does not tell you the name of it or what it is about, so there is nothing to type into Google. You end up guessing at a town name or maybe a road.

Those markers are not rare. The Texas Historical Commission counts more than 16,000 of them, in every one of the state's 254 counties, placed through a program that dates to 1962. Each one exists because somebody in that county did the research, wrote it up, and applied for it. That is thousands of researched local histories sitting along the roads, and the delivery mechanism for all of them is a metal plaque you have to pull over and stand in front of. Some have been defaced, and some are simply gone.

Nobody was going to hire voice actors to narrate 16,000 Texas markers. That is why an audio tour guide app for the open road did not exist. It was not that the material was missing. It was that the material was everywhere, which made it impossible to produce the old way.

What changed

A few years passed. Then AI arrived, and I spent 2023 through 2025 experimenting with it and launching various sites and products.

I did not come back to the tour guide idea until the summer of 2026. By then text to speech had gotten good enough to listen to for real. Not perfect, but past the point where a generated voice is a distraction, which was the part that had blocked the idea for years. The narration cost had come down, and so had the cost of assembling a story from source material.

That was the whole obstacle. Not the maps, not the GPS, not the phone in the cup holder. The obstacle was that somebody had to write and record tens of thousands of stories, and no one was ever going to do that. Once that stopped being the case, the app I had thought about on the drive to Illinois became something we could actually build.

I had a clear picture of it and my wife's blessing, so I started to build it.

Whistlestop is live

We launched Whistlestop in August 2026, and it is now on the App Store for iPhone. You press one button, Start Tour, and drive. It tells you about the places you pass.

There is a lot we want to improve. The first priority is getting it in front of people like us, who wonder about the towns they drive through and the markers they pass without stopping. The version we have now is the idea from that drive, working.

The best part is that it is an app Anna and I use ourselves, on our own trips, for the same reason we wanted it in the first place. I hope you get something out of it too.