How our guides are made
Our guides are made… largely the traditional way. It always starts with an idea. Sometimes it takes shape over a long time; sometimes it comes to us on the spot. We visit every place in the guide ourselves – that’s where the “little details” and tips you’ll find in the content come from. And the suggestions on where to go next.
The idea then becomes a script – a ready plan for the route: how many stops, what to talk about and where… A script like that can take us weeks of work. From it comes the finished text.
Then it’s time for the first draft. We create a script and then turn it into an audio guide. This takes a great deal of time – after all, a guide has to sound good when you hear it.
Only when the whole route is finished and every description approved do our translators get to work. They are always real people, and always native speakers. Most work from “somewhere around the globe”.
AI where it’s needed. But not in our scripts.
And finally, one small (well, actually rather big) thing… AI. Many people ask whether we use it. The answer is: of course we do. AI sometimes helps us find the right words (writer’s block is real). It helps us check facts and sources, and it supports our translation work. All our audio guides are voiced using speech synthesis, which now offers what is essentially voice-actor quality. Our developers code with Claude Code, and our marketing team manages this website with the help of AI. Wherever it makes sense, AI lends us a hand.
But one thing never changes. Our texts – especially those written to be listened to – are still crafted by hand, by people, in a kind of “writers’ workshop”. The author is always a human being – and only a human can be a true author. AI can string words into sentences, but those sentences don’t sound right when you hear them. Sometimes it gets the facts wrong. Sometimes it loses the thread of the story. It has no real feel for a place on the ground (unless it “borrows” hints from somewhere). Machine translation struggles with names and proper nouns… That’s why, in our view, people have always been, still are and always will be the most important part of writing, editing and translating our texts. And we very much want it to stay that way.