When a human guide tells a story, and AI breaks the ice

Over the past few weeks, we hosted groups of guests on a particular walking tour in Valletta who asked Caravaggio about his favourite meal. They asked Grand Master Jean de Valette how he came up with the plan for the city. Someone asked what underwear was worn during the Great Siege of 1565.

These were not questions directed at a human guide. They were typed into AI-powered chatbots of historical figures, accessed by scanning a QR code at specific stops along a walking tour. The tour was run by Colour My Travel, the excursion organiser we co-founded in 2013, and was developed through the “History in Dialogue: A Collaborative Approach to Heritage Tours with AI Chatbots” (HiD-CATCH) research project.  This is funded by Xjenza Malta’s Research Excellence Programme. The project was developed by a multidisciplinary team including Matthew Kenely, Matthew Camilleri, Matthew Mangion, Alizea Schiberras, Jean Gove and Mark Bugeja.

We had the capacity to build self-guiding apps from day one, but we chose not to. Colour My Travel was founded on a simple conviction that travel is a deeply human experience, and the value of a guided tour lies in the human energy that fuels the content delivery. That conviction has not changed, and we remain committed to personalised experiences. What changed is our understanding of the problem with the traditional guided tour format.

A self-service app can take you around Valletta. It gets boring quickly since there is no rate of change, no surprise, no social momentum. After a few stops, you get distracted by other apps or notifications and forget about it altogether. A guided tour solves for energy but creates a different limitation. It is a broadcast-type experience. A human guide speaks, guests listen in silence. The thousands of reviews we have received over the years demonstrate that this works, but we have observed an opportunity to enhance the human-to-human experience even further.

The AI characters shift this dynamic. The human guide sets the scene and transmits the emotion of each stop. Guests then scan a QR code and enter a dialogue with an AI version of a figure tied to that location. These include Caravaggio, de Valette, and La Cassière. The experience moves from broadcast to co-production.

The most significant finding from this pilot was not the technology but the behaviour change. After interacting with the AI characters, guests found it far easier to share their own views and questions with the wider group. They could blame the AI for breaking the ice. A guest who might never challenge a guide felt comfortable challenging a chatbot, and that loosened the entire group dynamic.

This is the principle behind the project. The AI is not the experience itself, but it is what gives guests permission to participate in it. The human licenced guide remains at the centre, but the conversation opens up around them.

We are still in a pilot phase, with further tests planned before a full public launch. The participants we hosted completed a short survey to help shape what comes next.  Anyone curious about this experience can register for a free tour. 

Twelve years in, the temptation to turn a walking tour into an app remains easy to resist, and licenced guides remain central to what we do and the quality we deliver. What we have done instead is find a way to use AI that makes the human parts of the experience stronger.

Christine Seychell and Dylan Seychell are the co-founders of Colour My Travel