Pick a city. Start walking.
The city does the talking.
Neywo is a free self-guided audio guide app that helps travellers explore cities, landmarks and attractions independently, at their own pace. Nothing to book, nobody to meet: you open it in the city you are already in, start walking, and each place tells you its story as you reach it. This page is the whole thing — what a self-guided audio tour is, what happens on a walk, and the questions people ask before their first one.
The category before the product, for anyone who has not walked a city this way yet.
A self-guided audio tour is a walking tour you take on your own, with recorded narration in place of a human guide. You decide when to start, which way to go and how long to stay. The audio supplies what a guide would have told you at each place. No group, no meeting point, no departure time — the only schedule is yours.
You pick a city, open a guide on your phone and start walking. A modern one is location-aware: rather than pressing play against a numbered sign, it works out where you are and plays the story of a place when you arrive at it. The route is a suggestion you can leave at any point, and the tour ends whenever you decide it does.
A walking tour is a person. They answer your questions, read the room, unlock doors and re-plan when it rains — for a fixed price, at a fixed hour, with a group of strangers. An audio guide is a recording: it never rushes you, never has an off day, costs little or nothing, and works at seven in the morning in a town where no tour has ever run. The trade is conversation and access against freedom and cost.
You keep every decision. Start at dawn or after dinner, spend forty minutes in one square, skip the cathedral, change your mind about lunch, stop for the day and pick it up tomorrow. You also get silence when you want it, which three hours of continuous narration does not offer. And it works in places with no tour industry at all — which is most of the world.
Neywo is one of these that you do not pay for. The rest of this page is how ours works.
Five steps, and only the first two happen before you start moving.
Open Neywo on the web, iOS or Android, create your free account and pick a city from Walks. If you would rather hear a guide before signing up, the sample clips on this site play with no account at all.
Neywo builds a walking route through the city and draws it on a map with the stops numbered along it. Under the map, Tour stops lists each one with a photo, a line about why it is there and how long its audio runs — usually around two minutes.
This is the part that matters: you do not have to look at the screen. Walk at your own speed. When you reach a stop, its story starts on its own and the map marks it as playing.
Each stop is a short, self-contained story about what is in front of you — the history, the architecture, the argument that happened there. Between stops, nothing is said. Getting an audio guide to stay quiet is as much of the design as getting it to talk.
The player gives you play, back ten seconds, forward ten seconds and next stop, plus a scrubber for hearing the last line again. Tap any stop in the list to play it out of order — or ignore the route entirely and wander, and the places you walk past will still find you.
Neywo is a free self-guided audio guide app that helps travellers explore cities, landmarks and attractions independently, at their own pace. You open it in the city you are in, it puts together a walking route, and the story of each place plays as you reach it. There is no group, no schedule and no guide to meet.
Four steps. You choose a destination. Neywo shows you the places worth walking to, drawn on a map with the stops listed underneath. You start the audio guide and put the phone in your pocket. Then you explore independently, with each story playing when you arrive at the place it is about. Nothing plays in between, and you can leave the route whenever you like.
The same way a good local guide would: a place earns a stop when there is something to point out and a story worth two minutes standing in front of it. A city centre can hold nine things somebody has written about within a hundred metres, so the harder half of the job is leaving things out — narrate all nine and it is noise, and you would take the headphones out before the tenth. Neywo ranks them and talks about one at a time.
It combines satellite positioning with nearby Wi-Fi networks, mobile masts and your phone's motion sensors into an estimate of where you are, with an error radius attached. Arriving somewhere is then treated as a probability rather than a fact: several consecutive readings inside the zone, or you slowing down, before anything starts. That restraint is why the story about the cathedral does not begin three streets away.
Each place is researched from public sources, written to be heard rather than read, and narrated as a short piece of audio. Writing for the ear is its own constraint: a sentence with three subclauses works on a page and falls apart when you are walking.
Yes, in producing the guides, and that is the honest reason the library is this large and available in this many languages. Audio guides used to exist for about forty cities because each one needed a writer, a researcher, a translator and a voice studio — weeks of work per city, per language. What AI did not change is the part that decides when to talk: working out where you are and when to stay quiet is signal processing and restraint, and it was solved by careful engineering long before any of this.
As long as your walk. Each stop is a short piece of audio, usually around two minutes, and nothing plays between stops, so the length is set by how far you go and how long you linger rather than by a three-hour slot somebody else set. A short loop before dinner and a full day both work.
11 languages, and you can change language in the middle of a walk. That is unusual in this category: most audio guides in practice mean English and perhaps two others. This website itself is published in English, Spanish and French.
No. A walk gives you one, and it is the best way in the first time you visit a city, but roam mode has no route at all: you walk wherever you like and every narrated place you pass tells its story once. You can also tell Neywo how long you have and let it build a walk from where you are standing.
Yes. Bus rides follow real public lines you board with an ordinary ticket, the ones locals use — Berlin's 100, Lisbon's 728, Barcelona's 120, Madrid's 001. A short teaser plays as the bus comes up to each place, it tells you which window to look out of, and it counts you down to the stop you get off at.
Yes. Bike rides follow signed cycle routes and park loops, like the Planty ring around Kraków's old town, the Ciclovia do Tejo in Lisbon or El Retiro in Madrid. You get a cue before each place and the story at the place, and because you are moving faster than a walk the stories are shorter.
Yes. A city playlist plays every story of a city back to back with no GPS and nowhere to be — for the train in, the flight home or the evening before. It is the same narration you would hear on the street, just without the street.
The same stops, turned into riddles. Every answer is on the wall, the plaque or the facade in front of you, and the story plays once you have it. It is built for walking a city with people who would never have agreed to an audio tour, and it is free like everything else.
They are all free. Walks, bus and bike rides, roam, city playlists, quests and the walks you build yourself are the same library of narrated places, sequenced differently, and none of them is behind a payment, a booking or a tip.
That is the whole point of it. There is no group to keep up with and no guide waiting at the next corner. Start at seven in the morning or after dinner, break for lunch or a museum, spend forty minutes in one square, and pick the walk back up in the afternoon or the next day. Nothing in your day depends on you being anywhere at any time.
Yes. The numbered route is a suggestion, not an itinerary. Tap any stop in the list to play it wherever you are, skip the ones that do not interest you, walk them backwards, or ignore the route entirely and wander — the places you walk past will still find you.
No. You need a mobile data connection while you walk: the audio streams as you go and the app has to keep track of where you are. If you are travelling abroad, sort out a local SIM, an eSIM or a roaming plan before you set off.
More than 1,800 cities worldwide, including several hundred that have never had a scheduled walking tour. Within a city the stops are the things you would walk to: landmarks, squares, markets, churches and cathedrals, palaces, bridges, parks, museums and whole neighbourhoods. Every city Neywo covers also has a written guide on this website, browsable by country and region.
Yes, it has to. Knowing where you are is what lets a story start when you arrive somewhere rather than when you press a button. Your phone asks permission the first time and you can withdraw it whenever you like, which leaves Neywo an ordinary audio guide you play by hand. Your location is used to decide what to play. It is not sold and it is not shared with third parties.
It suits solo travellers particularly well: nobody to coordinate with, no single supplement, no group to be the odd one out in, and you can change the plan without negotiating it. It works the same way for couples, and for families walking at a child's pace. The one thing it does not give a solo traveller is company — three hours with twelve strangers and a shared subject is still one of the easier ways to have a conversation in a city where you know nobody.
For most sightseeing, yes — that is what it is for. The difference is not better or worse, it is who decides. With Neywo you pick the time, the route, the pace and the stops. With a guided tour a person picks them and handles everything, which is a real service. If your day is built around walking a city and looking at it properly, Neywo covers it. If you want somebody else to organise the day, book the tour.
A free walking tour is not free. It is a paid tour with the price moved to the end and the amount left ambiguous, which is a different thing. It also comes with a meeting time, a group of twenty, a fixed route that eleven other companies also run, and a pace set by the slowest walker and the longest question. Neywo has no envelope at the end, no meeting point and no route you have to stay on. What it does not have is a person to ask.
Yes. Every city guide, every stop and every story is free to listen to. There is no ticket to buy, no premium tier holding back the interesting stops, no trial that expires and no tip at the end — unlike a free walking tour, nobody is waiting with an envelope when the story finishes.
Neywo works on the web at app.neywo.com and as an app on iOS and Android, and it does need an account. Signing up is free and takes a moment. If you want to hear what the guides sound like before you create one, the sample clips on this site play with no account at all.
No. There is nothing to reserve, no time slot to choose and no ticket attached to a guide: you open the app in the city you are in and start walking. Anything you might want to book while you are there, from a museum entry to a boat, you book yourself, wherever you normally book it.
No account yet? Every clip on the samples page plays without one.Hear a guide
No booking, no meeting point, no envelope at the end. Pick a city, press play and start walking — or listen to a real guide here first and decide afterwards.