Show HN: Pavo Travel – AI Audio Tours Using Gemini Grounding and Places API
pavo.studio-hedera.comHi HN,
I built Pavo Travel, an AI-powered travel guide that generates custom audio tours on-demand for any location.
The problem: Traditional audio guides are pre-recorded and limited to major attractions. Generic AI guides suffer from training data cutoff—they don't know about places that opened last year or current hours.
Pavo Travel solves this by combining Google Places API with Gemini's grounding feature. Instead of hallucinating from stale training data, it pulls real-time information about restaurants, hours, reviews, and events happening now. Tap any spot on the map → get a fresh, narrated tour in your native language.
Technical stack: - Google Gemini AI with Grounding (real-time web search) - Google Places API for location data - Text-to-speech for narration - Flutter (iOS/Android) - Offline map support
It's live now. The grounding makes a huge difference vs traditional LLM approaches—no more "this restaurant opened in 2019" when it closed last month.
Would love feedback, especially on the grounded content quality and UX flow. The differentiation from traditional audio guides is compelling—especially the vivid, specific descriptions like "At 7:30 AM, steam rises from 'Yamaji'..." versus generic recommendations. What kind of latency are you seeing when generating this level of rich, grounded content in real-time? Good catch! Yeah, it's about ~20 seconds right now with Flash 3.0. Definitely on the slower side. I'm hoping to move to Flash Lite when it's out, that should help a lot. Also thinking about adding some better loading feedback so it doesn't feel quite so long while you wait.