My name is Grigory, I'm a backend developer from 9 to 5, but I'm also hacking stuff on the side, though I never reached the point of actually releasing anything. But now it's over and I decided to share the product I recently built.

Every time I walked through an interesting neighborhood, I'd stop every few blocks to Google buildings, statues, or street names. Felt like I was missing the flow of exploration. It also takes time to find facts that are actually interesting and not just dates or numbers. E.g. I'm not always keen to know when this was built, but rather if it has some story to it or if some movie was shot here.

So I built Waytale – an AI audio guide that automatically plays contextual stories as you walk past landmarks. No interaction needed. You can also trigger them manually if needed.

The core technical challenge: finding a way to get stories that aren't hallucinated by AI. Turns out it's not that easy.

Using Rails + Sidekiq + SwiftUI stack. AI generates different narrations for the same location based on selected "personality" (for kids, local friend, storyteller).

I went with Hetzner for hosting, was quite a nice switch from the usual AWS stack, got me back to the good ol' times.

Key learnings I want to share:

1. Marketing is really hard, getting things out there is just a 10% of a success 2. Communicate more and be nice, even if you're anxious about it, don't be shy, getting out of this shell helps a lot. 3. Try new things, while building it I learned so much that it's already feels like a success. We tend to lock in on our stacks at work, we deploy to same servers over and over and we forget how cool it is when you can control everything and dashboard does not look like a spaceship control panel.

And finally, free tier gives you 3 POI per city, then city unlock model ($3-10 per city).

I have quite a lot of ideas on how to improve it, but for now would appreciate any feedback you have. Please don't hesitate to let me know which city you want to see there.

Try it: https://waytale.app