Autio: Road Trip & Travel App

This app is great. Awesome companion for any roadtrip

Autio is the best! Plays stories about the locations around me and helps me learn so much on road trips.

This app really added to our trip as it gave us insights that we would not have known about otherwise and didn’t have to spend a lot of time reading in a guidebook. We could just hear the stories as we were driving from one place to the next. Really cool. Looking forward to using it again with our family.

The good: We’re really enjoying the stories so far and looking forward to many more for an upcoming road trip. The bad: the endlessly nagging pop-up trying to get me to turn on background location. It makes me wonder what they’re doing with this data and why they want it so badly. When I want road stories, I’ll open the app— otherwise it’s none of your business where I am.

If I had known it was mostly AI readers, I wouldn’t have subscribed. The mispronunciations and stilted audio is driving us crazy.

I saw a recommendation for this app, and thought it sounded like a good idea as I was about to leave on a trip to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. This was the first time traveling in this area, and I thought getting the audio info while driving would be great. I will admit that the stories and information provided in the app are great, will good narrators. The bad part of the app is the navigation of the app and the overall GPS capabilities. Our rental car had CarPlay, so I was expecting to start driving pull up the app with a map, and either select stories on the map, or have them automatically play as we approached an area. Instead, the app would play one story after another, with not real relation to where we were. The app seems to want to play what is the next closest story that has not yet been played. So after listening to the stories in the Olympic peninsula, it started to play stories on islands, and in Canada that were nowhere near where we were. Selecting what we wanted to listen to was challenging, because it wants you to create and use a playlist which is not viable to do within CarPlay while driving. It was very frustrating to extract the stories we wanted to hear in the places where we wanted to hear them. At the end of the trip, we spent a day in Seattle, and the app is extremely worthless in a big city. The map is plastered with all these markers for stories, that I guess would just randomly play based on gps, and what was close by that was not played, even if it was miles away. We stopped using it out of frustration. I have used other travel info GPS apps that are so much better than this. I think Autio put too much effort into the stories, with very little real world usability testing. The apps that get it right are "Kauai Revealed Drive Tour". It was perfect, because it played the relevant info as you approached a site, not just because it is the closest unplayed story. The other great travel app is "GPSmyCity". Although it does not have narration, just text to voice, it provides a walking tour with a map. For over 1500 cities around the world. This would be a much better experience in Seattle compared to Autio. I purchased a subscription because I expected a great app, but I will say I am extremely disappointed. There needs to be a lot usability work on this app before I could recommend it to anyone.

It’s garbage. Notifications don’t work. There’s nothing automated about it. No integration into anything else. If I kept the app open and watched the map I could click a story. That was it. CarPlay app is even worse.

I just downloaded this app and there are not to many stories around my area. There isn’t a story for Bluebell in Brenham that is crazy! Texas is so rich with stories of things that have happened. Also have the developers considered adding all the historical markers to the app? I believe that would make this even better. Overall the app is really good from what I can tell just lacking stories that could be a great addition. I really hope that the developers see this and add the Texas historical markers.

This is very good app in terms of your objective, but the apps really sucks. It doesn’t play on time on audio and it just have no idea how the app works.

This app is a great idea, however the app does not work most of the time. You constantly have to select each story as you drive, despite location settings being turned on. The app s buggy and not simple to use. I chose not to renew until the app is fixed.