National Gallery London Buddy

This a nothing but a cheap way to seduce customers to download a ‘free’ ‘guide’, but instead deliver only a few fragments. An upgrade -and payed version- to a real guide is almost immediately required after the download. Another doubtful thing is that the producers didn’t make any effort to use a real human for the audiofragments, but made a robot repeat the readable text, that accompanies the paintings. There are more apps like this, about other museums from the same producers.

Very incomplete, disappointing.

Did the 2 hr tour saved me a great deal of time

This was the only audio guide I could find for the national gallery, so I pressed on past the terrible reviews - and was very glad I did! The audio was easy to search for via the numbers next to the paintings that all matched perfectly. I did pay £3.50 to upgrade to the full version to access all paintings, which I felt was a fair price. The voice is clear, well paced and contains lots of interesting info that is not listed next to the painting. Some of it is from an automated text reader I think so the pronunciations are not perfect, but that did not take away from my enjoyment at all.

Many paintings are not listed or indeed in the audio guide.

Has lovely descriptions and audio. It was a life saver at the museum as the routes at the gallery were crystal clear and we just followed it

What fabulous potential: to explore these historical paintings up close while listening to interesting background information. In practice squandered by the high-school level of writing and the impossible-to-listen-to computer ‘reading’ of the same. You can imagine the developers telling the Gallery “... and better still, the computer can read everything for free; no need for voiceovers or editing...” A few years ago the BBC (I think) did a short radio series where experts discussed the paintings while were the audience examined them via a browser in high res detail. The perfect format... shame that the developer couldn’t learn from that and gets this app so badly wrong.

Total disgrace! Wanted some info on Velázquez’s St John on Patmos, labelled 1093 with audioguide symbol in gallery, and paid for the full version of this rubbish app in order to find it. Nothing. Total waste of money. National Gallery: please outsource your app to a competent developer.

I made the classic mistake of not reading the reviews before getting the app. It isn’t just mediocre but really terrible. The info about the paintings often sounds like a bad translation from another language. It is poorly organised. I’ve given up on using it. Waste of money.

Hard to use, you select a room but have to scroll through multiple paintings to find the one your in front of, why aren’t they displayed is a grid so you can select the correct painting. The tours are so unusable they because of the one way system, which is fair enough but don’t then sell an app that can’t be used. Don’t even get me started on the voice, computer generated and can’t pronounce the names or the painters properly. Worst app I’ve downloaded, wish I’d read the reviews before buying.