Every destination deserves a guide, and every guide deserves a longer reach.
Odisea makes both possible: self-guided audio tours with routes, narration, and translations, opened on a phone. Some are created on demand, for anywhere on Earth, at any hour. Others are crafted by guides, tourism teams, and locals themselves.
A thoughtfully crafted tour can transform how a destination is felt and how it lives on in memory. I am building Odisea for both sides of that encounter: travelers who arrive curious, and the people who know what a place has to say.
The vision
I want everyone who moves through a place with curiosity, whether they crossed an ocean or live around the corner, to have a guide-like presence beside them. Something that can explain what is worth knowing and why, and help the place open up.
Today, that presence is a luxury. A great private guide is expensive. A group tour is a lottery. And even when money and luck line up, there is the tour that left an hour before you arrived, the language nothing is offered in, the small town where no guide works at all.
Odisea exists to cover that gap: to be there when no guide can be. A guidebook that speaks, walks with you, answers at the moment the question arrives, and never goes out of date.
And for the guides themselves, Odisea is how they can be there too: their knowledge, their perspective, carried further than their own two feet, into the hours, languages, and places they could never cover alone.
Why Odisea began
For almost a year, I led free walking tours in Heidelberg. I became obsessed with the small decisions that shaped the experience: the route we took, the order in which a story unfolded, and the right way and time to see the castle ruins. A few meters or a few minutes could change how the whole city revealed itself.
No two groups were the same, so no two tours should feel exactly the same. I asked people where they came from and connected Heidelberg's history to their own countries and experiences. I watched for what made them curious, what needed more context, and what could be left unsaid. The work was not simply knowing the facts. It was choosing the right fact for the people in front of me, in the place where it could matter most.
That year taught me that a great tour is carefully constructed and deeply responsive at the same time. The guide creates the route and the narrative, but the people walking alongside them help determine how the story is told.
Odisea began from wanting to carry that kind of care beyond the tours one guide can lead in person. It should help storytellers shape the route and the story deliberately, then make the experience responsive to each traveler: where they are, what they are curious about, and what might make the place come alive for them.
Who is behind Odisea
I am Dr. David Sosa, Odisea's founder. My background is in deep technology: world-class research and engineering. As a physicist at CERN, I worked on the largest scientific instrument ever built. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Hyundai, I taught cars to drive themselves. And in between, I was that walking tour guide in Heidelberg.
Both halves are essential here. The research and engineering are why the technology underneath Odisea is built properly. The guiding is why I care how it feels when it reaches a traveler standing somewhere new.
Odisea is small, and that is currently a feature: if you write to Odisea, you are writing to me, and if we build something together, you build it with me.
What Odisea is building
Creators start with source material: routes, notes, links, photos, PDFs, local knowledge, or personal memory. Odisea helps shape it into stops, narration, translations, and a map. See how the AI audio tour workflow works.
Travelers open the tour on a phone, follow the route at their own pace, and listen at each stop. The experience can serve a city walk, a shore excursion, a museum route, a park trail, or an event.
The point is to lower the threshold for creating a tour without flattening the story. Professional guides and institutions should be able to publish faster. And someone should be able to build a route through the streets where they studied, the corner they still remember, the place that changed how a city felt.
This is already happening. The Geschichtlicher Arbeitskreis Gonzenheim, a historical association in Bad Homburg with four decades of local research, turned its knowledge into an interactive walking tour in weeks rather than months, launched on Germany's Tag des offenen Denkmals. Their favorite outcome is mine too: even residents who had lived there for years discovered new stories about places they pass every day.
Over time, tours should become more responsive to the person listening, not as a marketing promise, but as a continuation of what great guides and generous locals already do instinctively.
Odisea is live today as an iOS and Android app, where tours can be listened to and created.
If you are a guide, tourism team, venue, event organizer, or local storyteller with a place to explain, I would like to hear from you.
Tell me what you want to build