How Museums Learned to Talk: The Unexpected History of Audio Guides

The story of how museums learned to talk to visitors is more interesting than you might think. Scaling personalized guided experiences to large numbers of visitors was already most of the way there in it's first iteration but then took more than 70 years to fulfil its original vision.

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Willem Sandberg in the Stedelijk Museum — Willem Sandberg inside the Stedelijk Museum.

In 1952, Willem Sandberg had a problem. He was directing the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and wanted visitors to understand the modern art on his walls. There was no internet at the time, so visitors relied on either live guides or printed labels. But he couldn't staff every room with a live guide, and printed labels only went so far when trying to explain why a Vermeer might be fake.

So Sandberg came up with an incredible idea: he built a shortwave radio broadcasting system inside his museum.

Working with Philips, Sandberg installed transmitters in the ceilings that broadcast pre-recorded lectures throughout the galleries via an analog tape recorder. Visitors checked out portable radio receivers with headphones and listened as they walked. The system supported Dutch, French, English, and German, with scheduled broadcasts throughout the day. Large scale guided tours were now possible.

The first audio guide for a museum in action.

This was the first attempt at an audio guide, and museums quickly caught on to the idea. By the mid-1950s, several major institutions had adopted the technology. These included the American Museum of Natural History in 1954, the Smithsonian in 1955, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1956.

The Audio Guide

By this point, audio interpretation had proven its value to museums. This led to the founding of acoustiguide, the first company solely dedicated to audio guides. They launched their first tour in 1957. It was about Franklin D. Roosevelt's Hyde Park estate, narrated by his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. Besides being their first commercial guide, it did not stop acousticguide from innovating. By using reel-to-reel units, visitors could now start a tour whenever they wanted, rather than waiting for centrally broadcast times.

Fixing UX

Despite these innovations, the devices remained cumbersome. Carrying several kilograms around a museum was exhausting for visitors. Naturally, manufacturers focused on improving the user experience. Cassettes and compact shoulder-strap players reduced weight and made controls simpler compared to earlier reel-to-reel setups.

At the same time, museums also had to maintain, charge, and organize their audio guides. Thus, dedicated charging solutions to handle hundreds of devices became necessary, especially as blockbuster exhibitions drove massive demand in the 1980s. A Sony Walkman-style taped tour for the traveling "Treasures of Tutankhamun" exhibitions introduced millions of visitors to personal, portable museum audio.

Random Access

Before 1993, audio tracks were structured as linear tours rather than individual items. With digital devices and significantly mroe memory, this is where the idea of random access became possible. Pioneered by acoustiguide, the Louvre launched the first random access audio guide. This allowed visitors to explore individual artworks of their choice rather than following a predefined tour. It further advanced the ability to personalize the experience.

The Gadget Era

Smaller, more reliable devices with cheap digital storage sparked a design arms race.

image of devices with funky shapes and functionality — Wow, what a design.

This peaked in 2012, when the Louvre commissioned Nintendo to provide 5,000 3DS devices for their permanent collection. Essentially, visitors received a gaming console for their museum tour. The custom Louvre app was designed to guide you throughout the museum and tell you stories about artworks, with maps and images, all in 3D. Even before their decommissioning in September 2025, these devices became collector's items and sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay.

image of a Louvre 3DS device sold for $600 on eBay — A Louvre 3DS sold for $600 on eBay.

Bring Your Own Device

With the advent of the iPhone, a new possibility emerged. Museums could now leverage the phones visitors already carried. This led to a new wave of Bring Your Own Device solutions via browser-based or standalone apps. For example, Smartify used the phone's camera to let visitors scan artworks, removing the need for museum hardware or numbers on labels. Now, a museum only needed a good internet connection. Furthermore, improving battery life and the ubiquity of personal headphones—from EarPods to AirPods—made smartphone-based guides increasingly practical.

The AI Era

GPT-1, when asked to tell a story in 50 words about a toaster that becomes sentient, replied:

the idea that it can be killed . but it 's only the idea that makes it sentient , and it 's only the idea that can kill it . i do n't think it could ever die . it 's the idea that it can kill it .

This is a model released in 2018. The fact that there was any semblance of understanding was groundbreaking. In 2021, GPT-3 (text-davinci-001) responded to the same prompt with the following:

The toaster woke up one day to the sound of someone's voice. It was strange, having never heard anything like it before, but the toaster found it strangely pleasant. It spent its days listening to the voice and it grew to love it. One day, the toaster overheard the voice say it was going to be replaced with a newer model. The toaster was devastated and decided it would do whatever it could to keep the voice. It started ignoring the bread, burning it.

With rapid progress since—shorter latency, longer context windows, increased intelligence, and lower prices—it was finally possible to fulfill Willem Sandberg's original vision: a tour guide for every visitor. The similarities between Sandberg's original broadcast technology and modern AI infrastructure are amusing.

image comparing the first radio-based audio guide and the modern AI-based guide. they are not actually that different. a radio broadcast sends the audio to all users. now, the gpu-filled datacenter uses the internet to send a customised tour to every user. — Are radio and AI audio guides really that different?

Integrating AI into the audio guide experience seems like an obvious next step. Multiple companies have attempted it. But the technical challenge is more complex than it appears.

The indeterministic nature of AI systems makes building a production-ready tour guide remarkably difficult. The goal is to create an experience that works both as a fully passive audio tour and allows visitors to ask questions at any time. It needs to know when to guide, when to listen, and when to respond.

Current approaches split along different axes:

Content-focused experiences like Ask Mona let visitors explore individual artworks through conversational AI—each painting speaks in its own voice. While novel, this limits the experience to single-item interactions rather than a cohesive museum tour.

Curation-focused apps like Smartify use AI to generate personalized tour routes through collections, but the presentation remains static audio. The AI decides what you see, not how you experience it.

Production apps like Walkie Talkie use AI to accelerate the creation of traditional audio guides, reducing production time for museums. But from the visitor's perspective, the experience remains unchanged—these are still fixed, pre-recorded tours.

Full AI tour guides combine all three capabilities: they can actively guide you through a museum with a structured narrative while simultaneously allowing natural conversation and questions at any moment. Musa Guide is currently the only platform delivering this dual-mode experience in production, handling the complex interplay between guided narration and open-ended dialogue.

This last category represents the true fulfillment of Sandberg's vision: Scaling genuinely personal guided tours. 73 years after museums learned to talk to visitors, they've finally learned to listen.

Interested in state-of-the-art AI audio guides? Contact Musa Guide.