Discover is an iPhone app that follows the road and tells you about the places you pass: the castle ahead, the village on your left, what happened here. It speaks when something is worth a sentence and stays quiet the rest of the time. Hold the button to ask it anything.
What it does
- Knows what is coming up. It works out which places you are approaching, on which side, and how soon, and announces each one once, shortly before you see it.
- Grounded, not invented. Every narration is built from what the guide just read: Wikipedia in the local language, Wikivoyage for the character of the area, a live web search for what encyclopedias miss. It says when the record does not say.
- Made for the car. Narration keeps going with the screen locked, plays through the car speakers, and the steering-wheel buttons control it: pause stops the guide, next skips to the following place.
- Your interests, your narrator, your language. Add subjects you care about and it points out places a general guide would drive past. Three narrators, seven languages, your choice of how often it speaks.
It needs an OpenAI key
The voice runs on OpenAI, and you pay OpenAI directly for what you use: about $0.20 to $0.40 for an hour of driving. The app itself is free and has no account, no server and no subscription. To connect it:
- Create a free account at platform.openai.com. This is OpenAI’s developer site, separate from ChatGPT.
- Add some credit under Billing. $10 lasts many hours. It is prepaid: when it runs out the guide goes quiet and nothing more is charged.
- Create a key under API keys and copy it.
- Open Discover and paste it. The app checks the key with OpenAI and tells you if it works.
Common questions
The guide says “OpenAI refused the key”. The key was mistyped, deleted, or copied incompletely. Create a new one and paste it again in Settings.
The guide says “your OpenAI account has no credit”. Add credit under Billing on platform.openai.com.
It is quiet. Most of a drive is quiet on purpose: the guide speaks when something worth a sentence is coming up. Add subjects under Settings → Special interests, or set Chattiness to Often. In a tunnel or a dead zone it reconnects on its own.
It stops when I lock the phone. Allow location access “Always” in the iPhone Settings app under Discover, and leave the app running.
What does it cost me? Settings → Spend shows an estimate for today and this month, computed on the phone from what OpenAI reports.
Your data
There is no Discover server and no account with us. See the privacy policy.
Contact
rodolphecambier@gmail.com. Please say what the status line at the bottom of the screen said.