Are tour guide bots the future of Dublin tourism?

Extra.ie​

26-07-2025

My tour guide Brendan greets me warmly. 'It's grand to see you,' he tells me, and promises to introduce me to the 'historical, cultural and iconic spots of Dublin'.
The young man is vaguely hipster-ish, wearing a snood, with red hair in a trendy undercut, perfect teeth and a distinct Dublin accent, boasting of the 'magnetism of my city' with a playful glint in his eyes.
He's about to take me on a tour of some of the capital's most historic and interesting buildings, filling me in on their cultural and significance. Rose Mary Roche with Brendan at Christ Church. Pic: Tom Honan
But most intriguingly of all, Brendan is not real, he's completely computer-generated.
Dublin City Council recently launched a new app in conjunction with CityMe that features Brendan as Dublin's first AI tour guide.
CityMe describes itself as an 'artificial intelligence urban tourism audio company' which develops 'local' AI guides. Its tag line insists: 'With CityMe AI-guides, any city is your city.' Pic: Getty Images
To date, it has created city guides for London, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid and Seville with future plans for Berlin, Rome, Malaga, New York and Cadiz. The dominance of Spanish cities reflects that CityMe is a Spanish company.
The Dublin app was developed in co-operation with Dublin City Council's Smart Dublin initiative, which aims to use tech solutions to improve services and quality of life in the capital.
Once you download the app to your mobile, it gives access to over 540 locations across Dublin city. There are six tour neighbourhoods – Stoneybatter/Smithfield, The Liberties, City Centre North/O'Connell Street, Old City/Temple Bar, Stephen's Green/Portobello, and Trinity College/Docklands, with each having a dedicated introduction and options to explore individual locations in detail. Rose Mary Roche with Brendan at Dublin Castle. Pic: Tom Honan
By using geolocation and the latest in AI audio tech, Brendan will provide real-time narration in what is described as a 'warm, locally-informed storytelling style' about these places, which include eateries, museums, galleries and theatres, bars and nightlife venues, streets and monuments and shops.
The response from Dublin's human tour guides to Brendan has been mixed. Pat Liddy, a famous tour guide who runs walking tours in Dublin is not against the idea.
'I have absolutely no problem with this Brendan AI,' Liddy, who has over 20 years of experience, observes. 'It will be great for independent travellers. I don't anticipate it replacing the need for tour guiding as many people, tour operators and corporates still appreciate the human interaction and the great depth of knowledge and flexibility of our tour guides.'
Garvan Rushe of Dublin Walking Tours, who provides private bespoke tours of Dublin, doesn't feel threatened by apps like CityMe, but stresses that they miss out on the human connection that most tourists want.
'Thinking that tourists are coming here and they just need a live version of a guidebook is kind of superficial,' he says. 'It doesn't really understand that yes, for some people maybe reading a guidebook or having the AI equivalent is sufficient, but more and more people are seeing the benefits of having a tour guide.
'For us it's more about connecting with the person than it is about giving them information, So that's kind of another level.
'When I started tour guiding I came from a history background so for me I thought the most important thing was history. The more I did it, the more I realised that it is about talking to people and connecting with people. That's what people want, they want to meet real Irish people.'
Garvan emphasises that people want to immerse in a culture.
'I think all tourists would like to not be in a tourism bubble, and meeting a local, meeting an Irish person, having them talk to you about their city, their culture, their history, their everything, gives so much more fulfilment and contextual information than an AI tool, or any sort of tool that ostensibly tries to replace living tour guides.
'There is a place for it – these apps are always going to come along, so it's interesting to see what they do. From my point of view, as a tour guide who does private tours, I'm don't feel threatened by it, and I feel like even in 100 years people will be travelling to different countries and desiring human connection rather than just information.
'In seeing a city without connecting with the people, you might as well be visiting a ruin, because a city without its people, that is called a ruin.'
To test the accuracy of Brendan's abilities as a tour guide, I visited five of the locations he describes on the app to evaluate his performance.
This has been a religious site for over 1,000 years and Brendan correctly identifies that it is 'one of Dublin's most historic buildings' with a structure on the site since 1030.
He goes on to highlight the mummified cat and rat on display in the crypt – which were found preserved in an organ pipe in the cathedral – and the stunning views of the city from the tower.
He omits to mention that Christchurch was the burial place of Strongbow, aka Richard de Clare, leader of the Anglo Normans, who captured Dublin in 1170, or that it also reportedly holds the heart of Saint Laurence O'Toole, patron saint of Dublin, who was buried in France in 1180 but whose heart was brought back to Dublin, stolen in 2012 and then recovered in 2018.
Some major omissions here, I think.
Dublin Castle is described by Brendan as at the heart of Dublin city and 'steeped in power, intrigue and transformation' and that 'every step echoes with history'.
He correctly states that the original castle was built in 1204 by King John and that the only surviving part of the medieval structure is the Record Tower, which dates from the 13th century.
I learn that the castle was the workplace of the Dracula author Bram Stoker from 1871 to 1878, when he was a British civil servant, and that its gloomy corridors might have influenced his description of Dracula's Transylvanian lair.
I was aware already of the unsolved theft of the Irish Crown Jewels from a locked strongroom in the castle in 1907, so it was good to hear this highlighted by Brendan. He also stressed the symbolic importance of the handing over of the castle to the new Irish Provisional Government in 1922 as 'a powerful moment marking the end of British rule'.
Overall, a scant summary of the castle and its role as the symbolic seat of British power in Dublin.
This famous hostelry, named for its locale, sits in what Brendan calls 'the most vibrant and historic of neighbourhoods'.
He explains that the entire area is named after William Temple, and that throughout the centuries it has gone from a rough patch of land beside the Liffey to a wealthy neighbourhood to a red-light district and today, to a tourism hotspot.
The Temple Bar, open since 1840, is he says 'a mecca for music lovers' with live trad music daily and over 450 types of whiskey where 'the craic just never stops'.
He describes it as possessing 'the soul of an old-school Irish pub' but it presents more as a dedicated tourist operation to me.
Brendan omits that the pub building is listed by Dublin City Council on its Record of Protected Structures or that the Guinness World Record for the longest guitar-playing marathon was set by David Browne at Temple Bar back in 2011.
Nor is the Dublin entrepreneur Hugh O'Regan, a former co-owner, mentioned having been instrumental in fighting to save the area from becoming a bus station and securing EU funding to restore Temple Bar.
Brendan's description of Trinity College is effusive, identifying it as a 'prestigious university' where you need to wear your 'best garb' and that it was founded by Elizabeth I as part of a campaign to create Protestant institutions in Ireland.
He names former pupils including Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett and Eavan Boland, but doesn't explain that the Eavan Boland Library is the new name for the main library, formerly known as the Berkeley Library.
The building was recently re-named due to controversy about George Berkeley's status as a slave owner during his life.
Brendan correctly namechecks Trinity's architect as William Chambers, describing its classical design with 'impressive porticos' and the 'soaring ceilings' of its famous library that houses over '200,000 priceless volumes' including the Book of Kells created in 800 AD.
He does not go into any detail however about the ban imposed by the Catholic Church, forbidding Catholics from attending Trinity without special dispensation, which was not lifted until 1970.
He concludes that it is a 'must-see', which is hard to dispute, but it is a pretty superficial summary of the college.
Oscar Wilde is described by Brendan as a 'brilliant, flamboyant Irish man who was unapologetically, flamboyantly gay', an assertion that omits to mention his marriage to Constance or his two sons.
He goes on to say he 'dismantled hypocrisy with elegance, humour and style' in famous works like The Importance of Being Earnest, The Happy Prince and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and briefly references his downfall due to his homosexual affair with Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosey), which was 'criminalised by the laws of the time'.
He then describes the statue of Oscar by Danny Osborne as 'delightfully unconventional' but omits that it was commissioned by Guinness or that it wasn't erected until almost 100 years after his death, due to the lingering scandal.
He does say it is as 'clever and layered as the writer it celebrates' and captures the 'flamboyance and genius of the man himself'.
He also describes Oscar as a GOAT (the greatest of all time), which strikes me as inappropriate, bearing in mind Wilde was a writer with a rapier wit and not a heavyweight boxer.
While the CityMe app is easy to use and the information seems largely accurate, the audio excerpts describing each location are brief, most are one to two minutes, and with repeated listening sound increasingly generic and repetitive.
Everything is described in terms of uncritical hyperbole and there is no acknowledgment that history is messy, complicated and layered.
I suppose the absence of nuance and context are a feature of the AI nature of the 'content' but I don't see Brendan posing a substantial threat to experienced flesh-and-blood tour guides with a deep knowledge and love of Dublin.
On the plus side, for solo travellers with limited time or resources, the app could serve as an introduction to the events and people that have shaped our capital.
I have found myself dipping into it regularly since downloading to check out familiar Dublin buildings or landmarks that I have always wondered about.
Especially for smaller, quirkier places like the Sacred Heart Shrine in Pimlico, the Sunlight Chambers decorative panels on the quays and the Jesus of the Taxi Drivers of Cathal Brugha Street, it answers questions about how and why they came to be.
If Brendan can encourage more of us to be tourists in our own capital, then he can be a positive by helping us to appreciate the vivid and varied history of Dublin.
But from my own experience, visiting foreign cities and having them brought vividly to life by fantastic guides with a passion for their subject, I would always opt for a human to educate me about a new place, not an AI-generated spectre.
Sorry, Brendan.