Free Audio Tours

Free Audio Tours came out of a trip to the Midwest in the summer of 2026. To save money in Chicago, I rigged up a self-guided audio tour timed to the river water taxi, and it worked better than the paid version would have. On the same boat I watched a young woman quietly translating the sights for her parents in real time, and the idea clicked: a free, multi-language walking tour that anyone can pick up on their own phone would help a lot of people, and the math said I could give it away.

So I built it. freeaudiotours.com is a free, self-guided, browser-based tour platform - no account, no app to install, it works offline and speaks your language.

How it works

Each tour is a static Progressive Web App served from Cloudflare Pages. You open a link, the site uses your location to know where you are along the route, and the narration plays as you reach each stop. Because it is just a PWA, it caches for offline use and installs to the home screen without an app store in the way.

Built to scale to new places and new languages

The first tour was the Chicago river route I made on that trip. From there I built a repeatable workflow for researching a route, its stops, and a thematic through line, then adding it to the catalogue: Burbank’s Magnolia Park, and a Daly City and South San Francisco driving tour. Every tour ships in the core languages - English, Spanish, and Cantonese - so the person doing the translating on the boat can just hand over a phone instead.

The whole thing is meant to stay free. The affiliate links to related paid tours cover the running costs, so the tours themselves never have to.