Artificial Intelligence is transforming how local experts, museums, and destination teams create and share stories. As AI becomes more accessible, it is rapidly becoming part of everyday workflows across the tourism and hospitality industry.
In fact, according to a recent industry survey, 72% of hospitality leaders said they were likely to implement AI solutions in the next 12 months.
But AI isn't here to replace the human storyteller. It's here to make storytelling easier. By helping with research, drafting, translation, and content creation, AI gives creators more time to create memorable experiences and connect with their audiences.
If you're building digital tours with AI, STQRY Studio helps bring these capabilities into a single workflow. Built directly into STQRY Builder, it combines AI-powered tools that support every stage of tour creation, from research and script writing to translation, narration, and publishing.
Here's how to build an AI-powered tour guide using STQRY Studio, step by step.
Step 1: Connect Your Workflow with Studio Connect
Creating a digital tour isn't a one-tool job. Research, writing, and content management often happen in different places. And switching between these tools can slow down the process and make content harder to manage.
Self-guided tours and interactive experiences in STQRY are created and managed in STQRY Builder.
Studio Connect, one of the AI-powered tools built into Builder, keeps your content connected to the rest of your workflow instead of treating STQRY as a separate destination. It includes Studio for Desktop for AI-powered workflows and Studio CLI for developer integrations
If your team already uses Claude, ChatGPT, or Codex to research, brainstorm, or draft tour scripts, Studio for Desktop brings STQRY directly into those AI conversations.
Instead of switching between your AI tool and STQRY, you can access your existing tour content, ask the AI to revise or expand it, and send your updates back to STQRY from the same workflow.
That workflow has already made a difference for Aimee Bartlett of Vermont Wayfinders, who uses Claude with STQRY to speed up tour creation:
Connecting Claude to STQRY has dramatically changed how fast I can ship content. I write a stop in plain markdown, hand it off, and it comes back as a finished screen, formatted, mapped, and slotted into the right tour. What used to take hours of copying, pasting, and formatting is now done by Claude. I recently built a seven-stop guide in one sitting instead of spreading it across a week of evenings.
For teams with more advanced workflows, Studio CLI provides a command-line interface for interacting with STQRY content programmatically.
Developers can pull content, push updates, automate repetitive tasks, and connect STQRY with existing systems.
Step 2: Translate Your Content with Studio Translate
Offering your guide in multiple languages helps more people connect with your stories. However, traditional translation workflows often involve exporting content, managing multiple files, and repeating the entire process whenever your content changes.
Studio Translate, also an AI-powered tool built directly into STQRY Builder, keeps translation inside your existing workflow.
Once you've finalized your guide, simply run Studio Translate to translate your content into more than 55 languages without exporting files or relying on external tools.
Your translated content is added directly to your guide, which makes it easy to review and publish from the same place you created it.
As your tour evolves, updating translations is just as simple. Whether you've revised a stop, added a new point of interest, or corrected a typo, you can rerun Studio Translate to update your translated content without exporting, re-importing, or starting over.
Step 3: Add Narration with Studio Voice
Once your content is ready, the next step is adding narration. Traditionally, creating narration meant hiring voice talent, managing recordings, and re-recording audio whenever your content changed.
Studio Voice brings AI-powered narration directly into STQRY Builder, so you can generate, update, and attach audio to your tour without leaving your content workflow.
Simply choose from more than 100 natural-sounding AI voices across 24 languages, generate your narration, and attach it to your tour.
If you update your content later, there's no need to record everything again. Just edit your text, regenerate the narration, and publish the updated audio.
Whether you're creating a museum guide, a walking tour, or an accessibility experience, Studio Voice makes it easy to keep your audio as up to date as your content.
Step 4: Publish and Improve Your Tour
Creating a digital tour doesn't end when you publish it. Once your experience is live, the next step is understanding how visitors engage with it and using those insights to make improvements.
With STQRY Builder, you can publish your tour and access performance metrics to see how visitors interact with your content. These insights help you understand what works, identify opportunities for improvement, and make data-informed updates over time.
As your tour evolves, you can continue refining your content, updating stories, and improving the visitor experience based on real engagement.
Case Study: Smartacus in Action
We spoke with Dan Forbush, founder of Smartacus, and his colleague Dominic Giordano, who have been pioneering this process for cultural institutions in upstate New York.
Their work with Warren County and the Hadley–Lake Luzerne Historical Society offers a model for how AI and STQRY combine to turn deep local research into interactive visitor experiences.
For their Hadley–Lake Luzerne Historical Society project, the team transformed an annual live lantern tour into a permanent digital experience.
Using AI tools for research and writing, they turned historical materials into 34 narratives, including 17 first-person audio scripts and 17 third-person text scripts, giving visitors different ways to experience the stories.
The team organized their research in NotebookLM, used AI to support content creation, and brought everything together in STQRY. The final experience included AI-generated historic voices, geo-tagged locations, interactive maps, and content ready for visitors to explore.
Local experts remained central throughout the process. Feedback from the Hadley–Lake Luzerne Historical Society and Warren County GIS Administrator helped ensure the stories stayed accurate, meaningful, and connected to the community.
The result was a faster content creation process and a richer visitor experience. Smartacus' work shows how AI can support human storytelling, helping small teams create digital tours that preserve local history and engage modern audiences.
The Smartacus team is continuing to explore new possibilities with Voices of Saratoga, a STQRY-powered experience designed to bring the hidden histories and voices of Saratoga County to life through AI-enhanced storytelling.
Why STQRY Is the Perfect Platform for AI-Powered Tours
Once your content is created, STQRY makes delivery effortless. The Builder transforms your AI-assisted scripts, audio, and media into a polished, branded digital experience.
No-Code Builder
A no-code builder is a tool that allows anyone to create digital experiences without needing programming skills. Instead of writing code, users can build, customize, and publish content through simple visual interfaces with drag-and-drop tools.
With STQRY’s no-code builder, you can upload text, images, audio, video, and maps directly into an intuitive web builder. Easily organize your content, preview your experience, and publish it across mobile web, iOS, and Android.
Multilingual Reach
Reach more visitors by translating your digital guides into 55+ languages with Studio Translate. STQRY helps you adapt your content for different audiences with AI-powered translation tools, making it easier to create accessible experiences around the world.
Interactive Features
Keep visitors engaged and encourage exploration with interactive digital experiences. STQRY lets you add geofenced alerts, scavenger hunts, badges, trophies, quizzes, and 360° content to make every visit more immersive and memorable.
Analytics & Optimization
Understand how visitors interact with your experiences with built-in analytics. STQRY helps you track engagement across different stops, identify popular content, and optimize routes or experiences based on visitor behavior.
Together, these capabilities help turn your content into interactive, evolving experiences that visitors can access online or offline.
Create Smarter, More Engaging Experiences with STQRY
AI is changing the way stories are created and shared, but the best experiences still come from combining technology with human creativity.
With STQRY Studio, you can streamline content creation, translate your guides, add interactive features, and use insights to continuously improve your experiences.
Ready to bring your stories to more visitors?