Discover is a little app I built for road trips. You put your phone on the dashboard, and while you drive it tells you about the places you are passing: the region, its history, the castle on the hill you would otherwise drive straight past. All you need is an OpenAI key.
The screen is just a map. The violet marker is the place it is currently talking about, and the grey ones are places it considered but decided were not worth interrupting you for. There is nothing to read while driving, everything is spoken.
What it does while you drive
Every few kilometres it quietly looks up what is around you: Wikipedia, in the local language because that is usually where the good articles are, travel guides, and the web for the things encyclopedias miss. Then it decides what is worth mentioning. The bar I aimed for is what a good local guide sitting in the passenger seat would point out: famous enough, interesting enough, close enough to the road.
You can also tell it what you care about in the settings. If you say you like railways, it will happily talk about a small station that anyone else would drive past in silence.
It tries to get the timing right too. A place is mentioned once, a little before it comes into view, and it tells you which side to look. In the screenshots: 1.1 km, straight ahead.
And if something makes you curious, you hold a button and ask. It answers, and looks things up if it needs to.
The practical bits
Your OpenAI key stays on your phone and is only used to talk to OpenAI. An hour of driving costs somewhere between 15 and 40 cents. Everything else comes from free sources like Wikipedia.
It runs in the browser, so it keeps your screen on while it works, like a navigation app does. There is also an iPhone version of the same thing.
One honest note about the screenshots: they come from the app’s built-in test drive, on the road from Monteriggioni to Siena. The car and the voice are simulated so I could replay the same drive while building the app, but the map and the places are real.