Support

StreetLore turns the world around you into living audio stories as you walk or drive. If something isn’t working the way you expect, scan the questions below — and if you don’t see your answer, email us at hello@streetlore.app and a real person will write back.

Getting started

What does StreetLore do?

StreetLore is an AI-powered audio companion that narrates the world around you as you walk or drive. Open the app, tap Start walking (or pick a city for a virtual tour), and put your phone in your pocket. The app watches your location and plays short audio stories — landmarks, history, neighborhood quirks — keyed to wherever you happen to be. It’s curated in 100+ cities and generates narrations dynamically everywhere else, so it works on a side street in Lisbon and a back road in Indiana.

What permissions does it need?

Two are essential, two are optional:

• Location (Always) — required for narration to continue while your screen is off or you’ve switched to another app. iOS will ask once during initial setup. Without “Always,” narration stops the moment you leave the app.
• Microphone — needed if you want to ask voice questions about what you’re passing.
• Camera — used by Vision Mode: point your camera at a building or landmark and the app identifies what you’re looking at from your GPS + compass heading (the image itself never leaves your phone). Optional.

I’m not hearing narrations when my phone is in my pocket / I’m in another app

This is almost always because iOS Location is set to While Using the App instead of Always. StreetLore needs “Always” to keep narrating in the background. To fix:

1. iPhone Settings → StreetLore → Location
2. Choose Always
3. (Recommended) leave Precise Location on
4. Return to StreetLore

If the in-app orange banner “Background narration is off” is visible, tapping it takes you straight to this setting.

The narration cut off mid-sentence

iOS gives audio priority to phone calls, FaceTime, Siri, and certain video apps. When one of those takes audio focus, narration pauses. It resumes when the interruption ends — but in some cases (long phone call, switching apps mid-narration) we discard whatever narration was queued so you don’t get a stale “you’re passing X” about a place you’re no longer near. The next eligible POI ahead of you will narrate normally.

How are narrations generated?

For curated POIs in our seeded cities, the body is composed by an LLM from hand-picked source documents (Wikipedia extracts, OpenStreetMap tags, our own editorial summaries). For places outside the curated set, the LLM works from the place name + category + nearby OSM features alone — sometimes it has confident facts to share, sometimes not. Audio synthesis runs through Google’s Chirp HD TTS. Every narration is cached server-side so the next person who walks the same street hears it instantly without re-paying the generation cost.

For details on what we send to AI providers and what they do with it, see our Privacy Policy.

The app drained my battery

Background location and audio playback over Bluetooth / CarPlay are the heaviest drains. A 60-minute walk with narration typically costs about as much battery as a 60-minute podcast plus Google Maps navigation. To save battery on long sessions:

• End the walk when you’re done — the app stops listening for location the moment you do
• Lower screen brightness
• Use the “Sparse” narration frequency in setup

How do I share what I’m hearing with someone else?

Start a Party from the walking screen. You’ll get a short code; share it with whoever you want to listen along. They open StreetLore, tap Join party, enter the code, and they hear your narrations in real time. Useful for couples, family groups, and walking tours where the host picks the cadence.

Why doesn’t StreetLore know about a place I walked past?

Two reasons are common:

• The place isn’t in OpenStreetMap (our base map data), so the lookahead engine never surfaced it. Email us and we’ll look at adding it.
• The place is in OSM but our AI’s knowledge base doesn’t have confident facts about it — small independent businesses, very new construction, and obscure locations are most affected. We err on the side of silence over making things up.

How do I delete my data?

Because there’s no sign-up, your data is keyed to a random device identifier the first time you open the app. Uninstalling deletes all on-device data (walk history, saved places, preferences). To delete the server-side preferences and session metadata tied to your identifier, email us at hello@streetlore.app and we’ll erase it within 30 days. Full details in our Privacy Policy.

Still stuck?

Write to hello@streetlore.app with:

• iPhone model + iOS version (Settings → General → About)
• What you were doing when the problem happened
• What you expected to happen vs. what actually happened
• A screenshot if it’s a visual bug

A real person will write back, usually within a day.