You design the journey. Henry walks it with every visitor.
A museum shapes an experience on purpose: what to see, in what order, what a visitor should not miss. Henry is built to respect that.
You decide how much to guide, and how much to open up.
The museum sets the mode, and Henry opens accordingly. Either way every visitor has a way in, and can always simply ask.
The museum owns the what and the route. The visitor owns the depth and the pace.
Henry
“Wander wherever you like. If something catches your eye – a tool, a photograph, the smell of the kitchen – just ask me about it and we’ll go from there.”
For a place people explore freely, Henry stands in for the guide who is not there. He opens with an invitation, offers a first thread to pull, and never leaves a visitor in front of a blank page.
Henry
“The museum has laid out a route through this exhibition, and I can take you along it. We start below, with the bog, and work our way up. Stop me at any point to ask about something else – we’ll come back to the path afterwards.”
For a larger, curated experience the museum keeps its route: its order, its key stops, its pace, so nobody rushes past the heart of it or misses the ending. Questions branch off the path and return to it.
Two openings, and the only difference is how much the museum chose to guide. Both give a way in; both leave the way out open.
An audioguide gives you control, but no conversation. A chatbot gives you conversation, but no control.
Henry gives you both. You design the journey, and he still answers everything.
A curator corrects what Henry knows – never who Henry is.
You shape the facts and the framing of your collection. We keep his character steady, so that every visitor, at every museum, meets the same guide. That consistency is deliberate: it is what holds the experience together from one museum to the next.
Yours
The facts. The framing. Which sources he may draw on. What he leads with, what he leaves to the label, and where the route goes.
Ours
His character, his manner, and the rules he cannot be talked out of – including the one that stops him inventing an answer.
Three stages, and we always say which one a thing is in.
Control is set per exhibition, not once for the whole building. One gallery can run as a designed tour while the next stays wide open.
And the boundary, plainly: he guides, he does not police. Henry will always answer a question, and can always be asked to move on.
Running today
He opens with a way in rather than a blank page, drawn from your own collection. Corrections to what he knows are live and versioned, and they carry forward: nothing changes silently.
Built with you
The designed tour – the works, the order, the stops that are mandatory, the arc that ties them together, what he leads with at each. We build these hand in hand with your curators; the tour builder they use themselves follows. A tour you design once runs in every language he speaks.
Fitted to your museum
Holding a visitor to a genuinely fixed route, and anything that depends on knowing where someone is standing, needs positioning inside the building. That comes as part of a pilot fitted to yours.
Two things in the tour builder exist because museums asked for them by name: signing off is a separate act from publishing, so nothing reaches a visitor by accident – and a work that goes on loan or comes off display can be pulled from a live tour the same day.
Your guides keep their room.
Henry does not change the role your guides, hosts and volunteers play today. A guided tour is still the best thing a museum can offer, and most visitors will never be on one. He is for the other hours.
- The tour still runs, with the same people
- Henry answers the visitors nobody could get to
- The route you designed is the route he walks
- Your interpretation sets the direction, always