KrokApp – personal audio guide in Belarus

KrokApp is an IT platform that allows you to learn interesting facts, practical information and useful notifications as a person moves around the area. KrokApp turns the country into a big “smart home” - understandable, dynamic, modern.

You can find information about more than 70 cities in Belarus using KrokApp. The content is available in three languages ​​– Belarusian, English and Russian. A prototype has already been developed for the Czech and Chinese languages. Content providers actively add content to the shared server krokapp.com, which instantly provides access to electronic data to all users.

The KrokApp IT platform is open for improvement and development by programmers, as well as for replenishment of useful data from historians, professional guides, tourist centers, local historians, museums and amateurs.

Problem to be solved

There are 118 districts, 115 cities, 85 towns and 23,065 localities in Belarus. Each of them can be told about by modern means to a wider audience – both foreign tourists and the residents of localities themselves. 

The number of cities that can be found through mobile applications (not audio guides) that are in the Google Play mobile application store: up to 20. Less than 10 mobile applications have audio content in major cities of Belarus. At the moment, there is no single program that would collect and present in a convenient form historical and cultural information about the cities of Belarus. 

According to a survey of random passers-by – out of 20 respondents, only 1 person could name sights that are not in one city, but in at least 5 different localities of Belarus. Therefore, it is an urgent task to develop a mobile application that would make it easy to get acquainted with the historical and cultural heritage of cities and interesting places in Belarus. 

Social effect

• Providing a simple service to present the history, culture and tourism potential of cities to foreigners.


• Raising the level of national education of citizens of Belarus.


• Advertising and promotion of well-known and little-known regional objects of cultural and historical significance.


• Attracting attention to objects of cultural and historical significance that are in emergency condition (objects of architecture).


• The opportunity to get to know the place without leaving due to epidemiological situation or another problem that the user has.

Project successes 

• An online platform of the project has been developed, available at the links: krokapp.by, krokapp.com.


• 2 mobile versions of KrokApp have been developed. The first one is freely available in the online store of mobile applications Google Play, available at the link - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=by.ssrlab.krokapp&hl=ru. The second one is published in the AppStore at the link https://apps.apple.com/us/app/krokapp/id1498624840.   


• Content about more than half of Belarusian cities has been added. You can get to know selected points of more than 70 cities of Belarus.


• The content is presented in Belarusian, which is further translated into Russian and English. There are several points in Czech and Chinese. 


• The project won the nomination "Regional Programs" of the social projects competition Social Weekend 8.


• The project was covered in the media - articles about it were published in the official newspapers "Science", "SB: Belarus Today", on TV TUT.by, a report on the project in the program "Live Air" on the TV channel "Belarus-1", news portals of regional cities.


• Scientific approbation https://ssrlab.by/tag/krokapp. 


• The project is promoted through social networks – Facebook and Vkontakte.

Project plans, directions for investments and additional subprojects

• Implement an example scenario of using the finally implemented version of KrokApp, it may be as follows. Tourist Jan makes a change in Minsk from train to plane, he has 10-20 hours of free time. KrokApp offers him a certain number of points to visit relative to a certain amount of free time the tourist Jan has. In addition, if Jan notes a desire to eat and buy something, KrokApp will adjust the route accordingly. Next time a tourist Jan may wish to visit another city in Belarus, and KrokApp will be happy to help him in this.


• Implement a system for automatically enabling useful notifications from KrokApp about sights during the user's movement.


• Add sights to all 115 cities of Belarus. Determine ways to add content about the rest of the localities in Belarus.


• Adapt KrokApp content completely for other languages, for example, Chinese, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, German, Czech and others.


• Voice-over  with the help of announcers this and new content of KrokApp.


• To work out the possibility of voicing KrokApp content using text-to-speech systems.


• Establish long-term contacts with professional historians, tour guides, ethnographers, journalists, photographers, announcers to create high-quality KrokApp content.


• Organize the ability to add your own information to KrokApp for guides, ethnographers, historians and other users. Tour guides will be able to get additional earning opportunities by posting paid content on KrokApp.


• To work out the possibility of collecting feedback from users about read or listened KrokApp content.


• Find partners for information, content and sponsor support of the KrokApp project.

Developer

Speech Synthesis and Recognition Laboratory of United Institute Of Informatics Problems of National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (https://ssrlab.by/). The content is prepared with the help of specialists from the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.

Other personal audio guides

https://krokam.com/

Useful links

1. Статистический ежегодник Республики Беларусь, 2020 / Страница публикации – https://www.belstat.gov.by/ofitsialnaya-statistika/publications/izdania/public_compilation/index_18023 / // Direct link to publication – https://www.belstat.gov.by/upload/iblock/c68/c68ec3c1ac53374bedc363044769f2c1.pdf