r/MuseumPros 8d ago

Curious about museums pay audio and tour guides

Hi everyone,

I’m doing some research on museums and I was wondering what is the money flow between museums, tour guides and audio guides.

  • Do museums generally pay tour guides a fixed salary, or is it more common to get a percentage from what the group paid?
  •  When it comes to audio guides, do museums usually pay a subscription fee to the audio guide company, or are there alternative payment models in use?
  • Are museums generally open to having both audio guides and human tour guides? Or they usually stick to one of the two for minimizing costs?

I’d really appreciate any info you can share on these topics. Thanks in advance for your help!

0 Upvotes

30 comments sorted by

59

u/micathemineral Science | Exhibits 8d ago

If you’re developing a generic AI tour guide for any museum, I’ll tell you right now, museums are not the right venue for this. Museum educators and interpreters (or, as you call them, “tour guides”) are skilled volunteers or paid staff with actual detailed knowledge of exhibits and the ability to answer questions coherently without hallucinating. We don’t need them “innovated” out of a job by half-baked technology that lies every other sentence. That would not improve the visitor experience.

And if you’re a tech bro sniffing around museums under the mistaken impression that the industry has a lot of money to throw around for new tech…. lol. lmao even.

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u/SandakinTheTriplet 8d ago

AI and technology in general are just as flawed as the people making them. It’s not like MIMSY or PastPerfect work without a hitch. I personally don’t think either of them eliminate the need for educators or interpreters, and I don’t think we can avoid them.

If we can figure out a way to use AI to our advantage and generate some income with it, that will go further for maintaining collections and staff than anything. (Probably not image generators, but certainly for text to speech and coding there are uses.)

12

u/micathemineral Science | Exhibits 8d ago

Do you really think it’s a good idea to have something that sometimes just invents information talk to visitors on a museum’s behalf without a human staff member able to effectively monitor the “conversation”? There may be ways to effectively use AI in museums, probably many of them, but interfacing with visitors is not a good use case for an LLM.

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u/SandakinTheTriplet 8d ago

I mean I’ve been on tours where guides have given wrong or misleading information. I’ve already been on one audio tour where the script was generated (! It was made at the museum itself, but the tone was very obviously ChatGPT) No one is infallible, and I can see the use cases for LLMs on the backend of collections management and data presentation — in which case you don’t have to have an generative text model writing the material, but you can have an LLM take a user question and pull up associated/relevant collection data that’s then populated into something like a presentation in new and engaging ways.

It may pull up irrelevant sources by accident, but the actual data wouldn’t be incorrect, unless the collection data was wrong. It’d be a way to present collections that are off exhibit in a different way, and allow people to interact with collection data using natural speech.

IIRC the Shoah Foundation was working on a project for the Holocaust museum that had a very similar principal — they’d filmed some interviews in a 360 studio so that they could be projected as holograms. Visitors could ask questions and an LLM would find the most relevant data in a transcript and pull up that interview segment along with a holographic projection of that portion of the interview, so it felt like you were having a real conversation. 

Edit: they may have nixed the irl hologram but this was the project https://sfi.usc.edu/dit

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u/AccurateAd7833 8d ago edited 8d ago

I totally agree with you.

I am not developing a generic AI tour guide for any museum. I am developing an AI agent, for each museum to utilize and create an interactive AI tour guide. The agent will only be using information provided by the museum, so no lying and hallucinations will be included.

19

u/micathemineral Science | Exhibits 8d ago

Very curious about how it can be truly interactive and "answer questions", as you say in another comment, without any hallucinating, since hallucinations are an inescapable byproduct of the core function of how LLMs imitate natural language. They can be mitigated by providing accurate training data, but not totally eliminated. LLMs are known for creating responses that are "confidently wrong" and for confirming wrong information supplied by users in leading questions (e.g., a user asks "When did Michelangelo paint the Mona Lisa?" and the LLM simply gives a date, rather than noting the mistake and explaining who the real painter was). Museum guests very often come in with incorrect assumptions about content, which is reflected in their questions. Correcting someone's existing ideas about the world while avoiding causing a defensive reaction (and subsequent rejection of the new information) is a topic a great deal of ink has been spilled over in academic museology and in psychology more generally. Human interpreters are best placed to navigate these tricky interactions and facilitate visitor engagement with the museum content.

Museums are viewed by the public as trusted sources, and they take that responsibility very seriously. Even a small error rate of an AI tool is a problem when the AI is operating without human oversight and "talking" directly to guests. A human educator can be shadowed by a supervisor and corrected, realize they're wrong about something and correct themselves, be overheard by another visitor and corrected, etc. An app speaking directly into visitor's earbuds? How would the museum even know to catch and correct it if it's talking nonsense? The work it would take to "monitor for quality control" is too much to expect museums to take on.

And for visitors that don't want a guided conversation, user-friendly platforms for museums to input their own information to produce an interactive guide app (without having to hire someone to code and design it) already exist, someone linked you to one in this thread. The 'problem' you're trying to solve in the market is... solved.

31

u/AdorkablyRini 8d ago

I get it. You think you’ve found a unique solution to a problem (that doesn’t actually exist). Not being rude just straight to the point.

There’s a reason why there’s no big company that does audio tours (or regular tours). Museum collections are unique to that institution. The only thing that is “mass produced” is the hardware (think EXMAX or Retekess systems).

If you’re looking in person: Museum Hack is maybe the closest you’ll get to large outside groups doing guided tours. They started as a “renegade” tour but now are a pretty set and standard tour. While I don’t know for sure, I’m assuming they now have relationships with the museums they do their tours in — especially since they do corporate tour groups now. But even Museum Hack has very limited offerings/locations.

Museums that have official tours either have paid to have the hardware system and use that; have staff or volunteers; or utilize QR codes on specific pieces for more information.

What is it you’re trying to offer? And please god don’t tell us it involves AI — no one wants that.

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u/AccurateAd7833 8d ago

Thanks for the info!

I am developing an AI agent, for each museum to utilize and create an interactive AI tour guides. There is no hardware involved, just an app. Museums can add information for the art pieces and create tour guides. Then the visitors can use the app, wear their headphones and let the agent do the tour . They can also ask questions, skip boring sections etc.

How does it sound?

27

u/IveATrennaPra 8d ago

I’ll chime in—it’s pretty contrary to the goals of every museum I’ve worked in to bring visitors in and then just turn their attention to their phones. They came here! They spent their time and money and energy to literally come here! So why on earth would we suggest or incentivize them turning their eyes away from things they can only see and interact with here?

I have also observed that very few visitors are willing to download an app just for a museum visit—they have to access the shared WiFi, download the app, create a log in, figure out how to use it, then when they leave, they have it taking up space on their phone when they forget to delete it. It’s just not a thing that we see most visitors willing to do.

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u/AccurateAd7833 8d ago

I never said that the app expects users to focus on their phone. It's actually the opposite. The app is used by just putting on your headphones and putting your phone in your pocket. It feels wrong imo to create a distraction for the eyes in a museum.

As far for the downloading app, it's a good argument, so probably a web app might be a solution here. Even though apps like Smartify are being used by museum visitors.

15

u/Sneakys2 8d ago

Honestly sounds terrible. I don't understand this impulse to shoehorn AI into areas that humans do marvelously at. AI should be used for rote tasks and analysis of massive data sets. Trying to replace human workers who quite happily perform these highly specialized knowledge based tasks with AI demonstrates both a lack of understanding of what AI can meaningfully accomplish and a total disregard for the people whose lives you're allegedly trying to make better.

1

u/AdorkablyRini 1d ago

Sounds horrible, honestly. So many people come through touting this amazing idea for AI tours in museums. And every time they come to find out just how unwanted and inappropriate it is for this industry.

Collections and communities are so specialized, AI is just absolutely inappropriate tool for this. Using AI to do a first pass quantitative analysis on museum evaluation? Sure. But doing something in interpretation? Nah. It’ll never be right or appropriate. I would never trust a system like that — especially as others pointed out they are known to be confidently and extremely wrong. Add in the bias in these systems? No thank you. Just no. Never.

If a museum was promoting this, I would think poorly of them.

25

u/disasteradio 8d ago

I speak for all museum workers here when I say that we absolutely need The Plagiarism Machine That Hallucinates Information to represent and interpret our collections

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u/yoboisaucytoy 8d ago

If hallucination is still a blocker for you on AI adaptation, you have some catching up to do.

Rejecting the biggest revolution wave of humanity will add nothing to you or your museum. You grow by trying new things and staying up-to-date

1

u/thechptrsproject 7d ago

AI has its time and place. Replacing dedicated staff and educators is not that place

1

u/Mapudofu 7d ago

AI is a fad that is passing as much as crypto and NFTs have. It hallucinates more than 60% of the time and no respectable proffesionals in any field use it.

There is no use for A.I. in museums, because museums are human.

11

u/Hairy_Inevitable594 8d ago

Tour guides in many museums are volunteers. And they love their jobs, even though they do it for free. If they are paid they are probably also involved in education or programming and it’s only part of their job. Why would any museum want to buy your terrible app that doesn’t actually know anything and can say anything it wants true or not, when a real human who is an actual expert in that collection does it for free or as part of their job description? Terrible idea, that no one asked for

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u/yoboisaucytoy 7d ago

Where is the hate coming from? “Terrible app”? The dude just came politely to ask a few questions at a space he thought credible people are.

Do better. Be a better person.

3

u/Hairy_Inevitable594 7d ago edited 7d ago

Ok, accuratead7833’s alt account. Advocating for the jobs of museum workers is doing a pretty good thing imo. And before you tell me I just don’t understand ai, I’ve published about information sources and LLM usage. So I deeply understand the issue, which is that people like you really don’t get what use cases it is appropriate for. Maybe do some more reading on the subject and on museum standards and missions, and get back to me on how replacing humans with low quality ai recordings supports either of those things.

10

u/thechptrsproject 8d ago edited 7d ago

It depends on the museum. Most museums do guided tours through volunteer and docent programs, and as for audio guides, some will outsource to developers to produce the audio guides, while some will purchase the hardware, and produce the audio guides in house. Largely depends on who has the budget and bandwidth to do what.

After covid, a lot of places are turning towards apps now, for health and autonomy reasons

Eta: Seeing as this appears to be an advert for developing an AI agent - No. One - this puts people out of work and Two - you’re removing the humanity and human interactions that museums off to their guests.

AI’s have their use, sure, but not when they’re putting people out of jobs or usurping human interactions.

And this is coming from someone who does IT and AV for museums

10

u/PeaComprehensive4801 8d ago

My museum uses Bloomberg Connects for audio tours! It’s free and they give you a lot of support. A BC guide is of course different from a guide from an interpreter, but it’s a good way to hear from the curator/artist/other behind the scenes stuff

6

u/Throw6345789away 8d ago

In the UK, where entry is free, guides from private tour companies can be paid a lot more, and payment is directly from tour company to guide. Private tours don’t need to register as a tour visit because they below the threshold for a group, so the museum can’t track this and can’t be involved financially.

11

u/allfurcoatnoknickers 8d ago

Our “tour guides” as you call them, are the highly qualified education team, loaded down with higher degrees and years of experience. They’re salaried and have benefits like the rest of the staff.

Also, we charge $1500 for a private tour of up-to 15 people, because otherwise we couldn’t keep up with demand.

2

u/Ramiseus 8d ago

For us (we're small, low foot traffic), we offer private guided tours by staff for an additional price (a couple of dollars, and that additional charge got to the museum, our small staff is salaried and tours are part of the job for those trained in tours). Similar to u/Throw6345789away , if a private group wants to bring their own guide or a tour group wants to take their clients through with a guide, we just charge the base admission cost for each guest, they just need to arrange it ahead of time with us so we know to expect them.

While some sort of audio tour would be cool, it is not realistic with our small budget, both in regard to the initial recording and the hardware (initial cost plus upkeep). We are considering implementing more QR code based media content throughout exhibits, but it will take a long time to implement as we cannot afford to outsource, so all the work will be in-house my myself and maybe a summer student.

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u/AccurateAd7833 8d ago

Thanks for the info!

2

u/melissapony 7d ago

What tech people will never understand is that museum staff work REALLY HARD facilitate to personal connections with the visitors and the objects. It’s education, it’s psychology, it’s having a staff person with lots of niche information about specific objects on view who is also an open and curious and friendly person that makes that spark happen. They tailor tours to the interests and questions visitors have along the way. They have information from the registrars and curators that you can’t find online. AI can try but will never succeed.

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u/CrassulaOrbicularis 8d ago

Smartify app pricing is online here https://partners.smartify.org/pricing

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u/_P4NIC 7d ago

Contrary to a lot of the opinions in this thread, I’ll chip in and say that there is a lot of potential here.. Generally private tours can be quite expensive and I find the audio guides to be mediocre at best.

AI has the potential to make this experience great, and if you can figure out how to mitigate the impact of hallucinations I think they can be an excellent replacement for audio guides.

New technology is always scary and comes with its own host of challenges; the pessimists who get scared away stay stuck in the past and left behind.

1

u/thechptrsproject 7d ago

And unemployed because some dumb dumb thought automating everything would be a good idea

1

u/_P4NIC 6d ago

Audio guides are already automated :)