SAMVARO Tour: city tours without radio receivers

Anyone who books a guided city tour knows the equipment: a receiver on a lanyard and headphones that many others have worn before. SAMVARO Tour makes both unnecessary. The guide speaks into a headset, and the guide's phone streams the voice live to the guests' phones. Everyone listens with their own headphones and sets their own volume.

How the group joins

Joining takes a QR code or a code with six digits. Guests do not need an account and can listen either in the SAMVARO Tour app or directly in the browser. The guide sees how many people are listening, sends short notes to everyone, closes the tour to latecomers or ends it with a tip. After the tour, guests rate it with stars.

The technology behind it

SAMVARO Tour is designed for use outdoors, for old towns, harbours, parks and market squares. The guide speaks into a headset on their own phone. The app sends the voice encrypted and in real time over the mobile network to an audio server in Frankfurt, which distributes it to all guests at once, like a video call in one direction. The transmission uses WebRTC, the technology behind phone calls in the browser, and arrives with less than a second of delay.

There is no longer a radio range that holds the group back: anyone taking one more photo around the corner keeps listening as long as their phone has reception. The microphone sits close to the mouth, so the guide does not have to shout over traffic. Phones stay in jacket pockets and headphones in ears, and nothing is handed out, collected, charged or gets wet in the rain. Speech runs as a slim audio stream of about 15 to 25 megabytes per hour, and after a brief loss of network the app and the browser reconnect on their own. The server is located in Germany and stores nothing.

The technology in detail at samvaro.de (German) (opens in a new tab)

Nothing stored, nothing recorded

Nothing about the guests is stored, and nothing is recorded. The audio runs through a server in Germany. SAMVARO Tour is part of SAMVARO, the participant management platform by adebar. The app will soon be available in the App Store and on Google Play, and listening in the browser already works today. The first tour is free, and guests always listen free of charge.

SAMVARO Tour at samvaro.de (German) (opens in a new tab)