Tour Guide

SeekBeak Tour Guide allows you to invite one or more viewers inside of your experience, with both 360º and flat image support. Everyone can see, hear, and chat with each other in real time.

This is not simply a video chat widget however!

When you use Tour Guide, you are in full control of every ones device, and this is what makes Tour Guide so powerful. Unlike other software which just displays simple video chat windows, Tour Guide replicates everything you do on your device, to all other connected devices as well.

With a click of a button, you’re able to remotely guide: Sales / Tours / Conferences / Inspections / Collaborations / Consultations / Progress Reviews / Virtual Presence, and more.

UPDATE: SeekBeak Tour Guide Add-Ons are currently free for Business and Enterprise customers during the Covid crisis.

Thanks to COVID-19, most people are finding that it is not business not as usual in a lot of respects.

In order to help you keep your business going remotely, we’ve made our paid Tour Guide functionality, (including our custom TURN servers), FREE for Business & Enterprise clients during the Covid crisis.

If you’re on a Business or Enterprise plan, go into your Team Settings area -> Tour Guide, and activate your Free Tour Guide Add-On.

Be Their Guide.

When you move your 360, their 360 moves. When you click a Hotspot, their Hotspot clicks. Say goodbye to “Now what are you looking at?”

Nobody knows your content better than you. Show off your content to your clients, students, potential customers, employees, teammates and more. Tailor each tour your own unique way.

Three Ways To Join The Tour

Video + Audio

Join using a browser on a device equipped with a camera and microphone, to let everyone see and hear you. Don’t worry, we include buttons to allow you to stop your video and/or audio at any time.

Audio

Don’t have a camera, or can’t find a clean shirt? No problem, easily join with just audio… like the good ‘ol days.

Chat Only

Just here to observe, found yourself in an area with poor signal strength, or inside a location with an overzealous network firewall? You’re covered too with the Chat Only option. You can still host and view, even without the audio/video components.

Pixel Perfect Quality.

Tour Guide doesn’t capture and stream video of your screen like other software, so there’s no compression, artifacts, or screen size issues when people are being shown your content. What they see on their screen is exactly what they’d see when normally viewing your Content.

If you open a Hotspot on your Desktop, and they’re viewing on a phone, their content will size to their screen, and your content will size to your screen. Magic.

No Software To Install.

Just like the rest of the SeekBeak platform, all you need to Host, or View, is a web browser. Desktop, Mobile, Tablet, iOS, Android, PC, Mac… you get the idea.

Keep it Cheap.

Reduce or eliminate travel costs and site visits. Save valuable time and money.

The Host with the Most.

Someone else on your Team have a bit more experience with a certain subject? Need your top sales person to swoop in and seal the deal? Tour Guide allows you to easily hand over the controls, and let someone else do the Hosting at any point, without having to awkwardly start a new session.

You can even hand over temporary control, via the “Guide” option, to anyone else in the session, and take control back at any point. For example: Teachers can now allow any Student to Guide the tour, while still being able to take control back any time they need to.

You can even leave the call, while allowing everyone be able to continue. Perfect for situations where clients might want to continue looking around and discuss among themselves after you’ve done your initial tour.

Keeping It Simple, Seriously.

One click is all it takes! Well, maybe two.

When editing your Snap, click the new Tour Guide icon in the Share menu, and send your unique link via iMessage, Email, SMS, Slack, or whatever your chat tool of choice is. That’s it.

People click the link they receive, and join automatically.

Invitations for All Occasions.

When inviting people to join in your Tour Guide session, you can restrict participants to audio only, or even just text chat. Perfect for a video stream of a host answering questions asked in the chat room.

Send your invite link out via any way you like! If you need a bit of help opening up your favorite app, we provide buttons to send it via Email, Skype, Whatsapp, Telegram, SMS/iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Viber.

Schedule your Tour Guide Sessions ahead of time, or Start a Tour Guide Session in Real Time.

Creating a optional Tour Guide Link allows you to:

Schedule times to meet, and send out the URL ahead of time, rather than just sending out at link the time of the call.
Have a waiting room with a customized message.
Specify the media options available for people joining, (combinations of Audio/Video/Chat).
Specify an optional URL to redirect to after the session is completed, which is ideal for sending people to an information, landing, sales page etc. after the Tour Guide session is complete.

Be Their Guide.

When you move your 360, their 360 moves. When you click a Hotspot, their Hotspot clicks. Say goodbye to “Now what are you looking at?”

Nobody knows your content better than you. Show off your content to your clients, students, potential customers, employees, teammates and more. Tailor each tour your own unique way.

FAQ

Participation Limitations

For Audio and Video, Tour Guide uses a fully connected Peer to Peer mesh network. This means that every person (peer) maintains a connection to every other peer. If there are 6 people connected, your device is transmitting your audio/video signal 5 times.

This means that the number of people able to connect with full audio/video is mainly dependent on the bandwidth and processing power available on the devices.

Audio only sessions will require less bandwidth than video, and will theoretically allow more participants.

The chat only option requires a very minimal amount of bandwidth and should allow many more participants.

Session Durations

Every plan has different time allowances for Tour Guide sessions. Please see the Feature Grid for up to date specifics.

Device Support

Tour Guide Audio/Video has been tested on the latest versions of Firefox, Safari and Chrome on recent editions of Windows and MacOS. It also works well on mobile Safari on iOS 13, as well as the latest Chrome browser on Android devices.

Network Support

Certain corporate networks and WiFi hotspots may block the Audio/Video connections, or not allow them due to security restrictions. We have workarounds in place, but they are not 100% guaranteed to work depending on your network configuration.

The text chat, and Tour Guide control functionality should work through any network connection however.

Browser Not Supported Message

If you’re using an older/not supported browser version, this message will appear. This message can also appear if you are trying to use Tour Guide over an insecure HTTP connection.

Text Chat functionality should still work in both cases, but Audio/Video requires a secure HTTPS connection with any browser.

My iFrames can't be controlled by Tour Guide

Due to abuse from advertisers and general bad guys over the years, iFrames are presented as a black box as far as all browsers are concerned.

This is for security reasons, so nefarious iFrames can’t read/see what’s going on in the host page, and nefarious hosts can’t find out things like your shopping cart contents or bank details if they iFramed legitimate websites. SeekBeak is blocked from knowing about anything that happens within a cross domain iFrame.

This means that Tour Guide is unable to ‘know’ what you’re doing inside content that is hosted outside of SeekBeak. This includes things like embedded 3rd party content, Google Maps etc.

Tour Guide can tell that the host has opened a Hotspot with embedded content, (and will open it for all viewers as per usual), but it cannot ‘know’ that you scrolled the iFrame content, clicked a button on the embedded webpage etc.