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An idea born from the frustration of travelling overseas without understanding museum displays is now helping New Zealand museums reach more visitors.
Kiwi founder Dale Baker created Journey Pal, a platform that allows museums to offer multilingual audio guides through QR codes, replacing the need for expensive handheld devices while making collections more accessible to a wider audience.
The technology is already being used at Bill Richardson’s Transport World, Shantytown, the Buried Village of Te Wairoa, Kaikōura Museum, Lakes District Museum and the New Zealand Rugby Museum, with thousands of audio guides already delivered. Dale is also working with other museums, including Tūhura Otago Museum.
What began as a need for international travellers has turned into greater accessibility for all.
Dale says, “I originally approached Journey Pal primarily as a way to overcome language barriers. I had travelled through countries where I could not understand the information at museums and historic sites, and I wanted to make translations easier to provide,”
” A mother with chronic fatigue was able to use the audio guide to help her visually impaired son experience the collection. It showed me that Journey Pal is not only for international tourists. It can help people with low vision, literacy difficulties, fatigue, or anyone who finds listening easier than reading numerous signs.”
He said digital content also gave museums far greater flexibility than traditional signs.
“Even if people don’t have issues with reading signage, audio is often just a more convenient format and providing this information digitally means museums aren’t as restricted by physical limitation imposed by signage. Updating a sign is a costly and expensive process, updating content on a webpage is much faster. Signs have physical constraints based on size and space- webpages can store significantly more information.”
And for smaller museums, affordability has been one of the biggest selling points.
“The core pitch for museums is this is now the easiest and affordable way to share information across languages and with audio. Tour guides and human recorded audio guides are very expensive to produce and so few museums offer them, but with the introduction of this technology, it should become available to a wider range of institutions.”
He says audio guides can now be sold through the platform as a revenue source for museums, and Dale hopes that more people will learn that the service exists and he is currently building a directory of participating museums to make trip planning easier for visitors.
“I hope that in the future, tourists and tourism operators can use this page to find places that support their language and can then plan their travels accordingly.”
Behind the scenes, every QR code scan and play button helps Dale understand how the platform is being used.
“I track each scan of the QR codes and each click of the play button. I only track it anonymously, so I rely on museum staff to tell me about specific user stories, but I do track the languages that are used.”
So far, the data has revealed an unexpected trend.
“Even though it was originally made as a translation tool, around 67% of usage is done in English, suggesting that locals enjoy the service too.”
Journey Pal is designed to complement, rather than completely replace, existing ways of sharing information and can offer free trials to museums.
“I think written text still has its place, but it comes with its own set of challenges. Headsets are significantly more expensive to produce and maintain and it’s difficult to provide them in the many languages. Tour guides are a premium solution, and I don’t think anything will ever beat them. However, for most people it’s not realistically affordable to have a tour guide available who speaks the appropriate language and works on the visitor’s schedule.”
“Journey Pal could be considered an alternative to written information like physical signage or leaflets, as well as physical audio guide devices like handheld headsets and in some contexts, tour guides.” Dale says.
“My goal is to encourage as much usage of this technology as possible so I’d encourage anyone interested to reach out to me.”
Journey Pal’s directory can be found here.
