Cape Town’s VoiceMap Produces Walking Tour for Trevor Noah’s January 6 insurrection Show
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, an American political comedy program, has teamed up with VoiceMap, a startup based in Cape Town, to create an interactive self-guided walking tour that takes visitors through the events of the Washington, D.C., uprising on January 6, 2021.
VoiceMap, a mobile app and publishing platform for location-aware audio tours that uses GPS to play audio automatically, was founded in 2014. Iain Manley, the co-founder, claims that the audio tours’ use of local voices helps familiarize visitors with their surroundings and fosters a sense of proximity to the storyteller.
Listeners of The Daily Show will be able to follow the precise path walked by Trump supporters who were protesting by participating in the walking tour, “In the Footsteps of the Freedomsurrection.” It will go over what happened prior to, during, and following the US Capitol building invasion.
The “Battle of Little Muffin Top,” during which President Trump fought against his own secret security detail alone, and the Ellipse/Save America Rally, a location on the National Mall where Trump rallied his supporters to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” are two highlights of the walking tour.
In an interview with Bizcommunity, Manley stated that he developed the app to match the immediacy of GPS with the intimacy of a real person’s stories and a real person’s voice.
“I wanted to create a platform that anybody could use to tell location-aware stories in their own voice – to match the immediacy of GPS with the intimacy of a real person’s stories and a real person’s voice,” Manley said.
On VoiceMap, audio tours can be submitted by anyone. The author then decides the cost of their tour and receives royalties for each download. People can choose which trips to download with the use of ratings and comments.
About VoiceMap
Iain Manley, a former travel journalist who now serves as the CEO and founder of VoiceMap, has given voice to those who have a much stronger bond with a location than a conventional tour operator.
VoiceMap is a marketplace and publishing platform for location-aware audio tours, to put it simply. Instead of the usual emphasis on providing essential (but dry) information about specific locations, it focuses on giving individuals a platform to tell their stories by allowing them to create and record their own audio tours.
VoiceMap enables users to design tours that aren’t tied to conventional tourist attractions but rather to locations they have a particular affection for. VoiceMap’s library of audio tours has been created by a variety of people since its start in October 2014, including authors, journalists, tour guides, and celebrities.
Before being sold online and through their app, VoiceMap’s submissions go through a rigorous vetting and editing procedure to make sure each tour meets a particular quality.
“Location-aware audio is not something people are very familiar with so asking them to create a great audio tour without having been on one is a bit like asking someone to create a great film without ever having gone to the movies,” said Manley.