About Words Atlas
Words Atlas is made by Journey Pal, a New Zealand company that builds multilingual audio guides for museums and heritage attractions.
Where it came from
Journey Pal started with a problem museums have: a visitor arrives, the labels are in one language, and the visitor reads another. Journey Pal answers it with a QR code. The visitor scans it, their phone’s own language is detected, and the exhibit is read aloud to them. No app to download and no account to create. Venues including Shantytown Heritage Park, the New Zealand Rugby Museum, Bill Richardson Transport World and Tūhura Otago Museum run it today, and the full list is public in the Journey Pal directory.
Words Atlas is the same problem from the other side. Journey Pal speaks a place’s language to you. It cannot help when you are the one who has to say the word: the station you need, the dish on the menu, the surname of the person you are about to meet. Building voices in a lot of languages for museums made it obvious how little there was for anyone who simply wanted to hear a word said properly, by a voice from the place it belongs to.
What it does today
You can type a word, a name, a place or a phrase, and hear it spoken in 31 languages across 43 native voices, each tied to the region its accent comes from. Signed in, everything you look up is kept in a history you can return to. Every voice listed on the home page is one you can actually select in the tool. Nothing is advertised before it ships.
How the pages are made
Every pronunciation page on this site exists because somebody asked for that word. Audio is generated when it is first requested and then cached, so a page appears once a real person has needed it. Words Atlas does not bulk-generate pages against a dictionary to fill a sitemap, and it does not publish anything it cannot actually speak.
Questions, corrections, or a pronunciation we have got wrong? Write to [email protected]. Words Atlas and Journey Pal are operated by the same New Zealand company.