Dwel, In Our Own Words
Meet the team behind Dwel and discover how we're giving places a voice of their own in the age of AI.
Read the transcript
I'm Simon, co-founder and Chief Design Officer. I'm Alex, co-founder and strategy and product lead. And I'm Jon, co-founder and CEO. And we're giving places a voice of their own.
We have spent the past 10 years building AI and XR experiences for places people love, including the National Gallery, the British Museum and Camden. Every project taught us that visitors don't want content handed to them. They want to ask their own questions, and be answered by a voice they can trust. Dwel is where this has all come together.
Dwel turns any place into a conversation. Visitors scan a QR code and talk to a Guide that knows exactly where they're standing and speaks only using content that the place approves. The voice is everything, giving places real character, in the visitor's own language, fast enough to feel like a normal conversation.
What makes Dwel possible is our Place Intelligence Engine. It models a place as a map of areas and nodes, and combines where the visitor is, what's around them and the venue's verified knowledge, so every answer is fully contextual and completely accurate. Our pipeline turns that answer into a voice with character. We create the spatially aware AI, and give it a voice.
Our proof that this works comes from inside here, next to Trafalgar Square at the National Gallery. In a live public pilot, over 70 visitors created over 3,500 conversational turns. Three quarters of the conversations went past five turns, with an average of well over 30, as visitors moved from room to room, following their curiosity instead of a prescribed route. As a result, we've now been commissioned by the gallery to support their Masterpiece Tour, giving a voice to a 17th century painting that's spending the next 12 months travelling all over the country.
There are thousands of places across the UK alone that right now just aren't able to answer their visitors' questions. Dwel is putting that right, giving them a voice that visitors can trust. We're starting with arts and culture, but then it will be high streets, destinations, retail: anywhere people want to know more. Every place has a voice. They can find it with Dwel.
Our Journey
Dwel is the culmination of over twenty years exploring the space between digital technology and physical place.
It began with our work as a global, award-winning agency built on a single mantra - connect people to place through play - using whatever emerging technology was at hand: interactive installations, location-based apps, immersive web experiences, AR, mixed reality. The tools changed constantly. The question underneath them never did: how do you connect visitors more meaningfully to the physical world around them? Could a place feel alive, responsive, and personalised?
Along the way, we had always wondered: what if a place could talk?
Conversational AI is the underlying technology that makes this possible. Not a chatbot bolted on, but AI that understands where you are, what's around you, where you want to go next, and how to help you get there.
We built Dwel for people who care about the physical world in the age of AI, who want digital experience to leave the screen and enter the room: museum and heritage teams, campus and retail innovators, destination marketers and civic engagement organisations.
If that sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.
What Does Dwel Do?
Dwel is a voice-first AI companion for visitors at physical venues: museums, heritage sites, retail destinations, visitor attractions, transport hubs, events, and campuses. It replaces the audio guide, the concierge desk, the kiosk and the visitor app with a single conversation: something you talk to, the way you'd ask a knowledgeable local, and it answers as if it's standing there with you.
Generalist AI can tell you about a place but it can't tell you about this place, right now, from where you're standing. And it can never speak with the authority of the place itself. Dwel closes that gap. It combines place-verified content and contextual awareness with direct venue partnerships to give every visitor a guide with the knowledge of the venue itself, available in the moment visitors need it the most.
For the venues we work with, that same conversation also offers something audio guides and footfall counters never could: a live, ongoing signal of what visitors actually care about.