Setting up Seba for a Gallery
A short guide for museum directors and curatorial staff on using Seba for a new gallery. All exhibits are added and updated using the Exhibit Management tool described here. Note that the tool is operating on a separate sandbox that is restored each day at 2am EST. Make changes as desired, they will not affect the app.
Everything Seba says comes from a handful of plain text files there is no coding involved. These are exactly the kind of text that curatorial staff writes, reviews, and updates regularly. They are the single biggest factor in a good visitor experience. Each exhibit also needs a few reference pictures to help Seba identify the exhibit that the visitor is viewing.
· Exhibit Description one plain text file per exhibit, copy-paste it into the Exhibit Management tool. The description text can be in English, German, French or Spanish. Regardless, Seba will translate and speak to the visitor in their preferred language.
· Exhibit Photos Add catalog pictures or snap photos using the Exhibit Management tool on a mobile phone.
· Venue Theme an overview of the gallery or collection as a whole, roughly 200300 words. This is the general context Seba keeps in mind for every conversation, regardless of which exhibit a visitor is looking at the institution's character, the scope and strengths of the collection, and any historical background worth knowing. Written once per venue, and rarely needs to change.
· Venue Header the very first thing a visitor sees when they open the app, about 1025 words. It can be in any language. A brief welcome plus a reminder to scan an exhibit label to get the visitor started.
· Venue Options a few venue-wide settings, also set using the Exhibit Management tool.
· Knowledge Scope = LIMITED, or GLOBAL LIMITED (default) restricts responses to provided exhibit descriptions. GLOBAL allows responses to includes generally known information. Use with care!!
· Duration = 15, 25, or 40 sets the default length, in seconds, of Seba's spoken answers. Visitors can still adjust this themselves in the app; this just sets the default.
· Silent Mode locks Silent Mode on for every visitor and is useful for galleries where quiet is expected or enforced. This mode hides the voice button, and removes the ability for visitors to verbally ask questions. Visitors can still choose the preselected questions or type in their questions. The response will still be spoken and should be heard using headphones.
Seba runs in a web browser, so most visitors can simply use their own phone no app to install. That said, a few practical choices make a real difference to the experience on the floor.
Most phones and browsers are supported. A full breakdown, including how a visitor grants camera, microphone, and sound access on their own device, is covered in the companion Visitor Guide, which can be handed to visitors directly. In general, Android and Chrome running on a modern phone presents the best user experience. Apple devices work well, but require additional button presses.
Headphones are worth encouraging even a simple, low-cost pair makes a noticeable difference. They keep the gallery quiet by avoiding a room full of overlapping phone speakers, they give visitors clearer audio in echoey, high-ceilinged, or busy spaces, and they make the experience feel more personal closer to a private docent than a public announcement. Headphones also pair naturally with Silent Mode: a visitor can listen privately even in a gallery where speaking aloud isn't appropriate, asking follow-up questions by tapping or typing instead.
Consider lending or renting tablets and headphones for the smoothest experience across every feature (camera scanning, spoken introductions, and spoken follow-up questions), Android phones running Chrome are recommended. If budget allows, a small fleet of low-cost Android devices, pre-configured with camera and microphone permissions already granted, removes any setup friction for visitors who'd rather not use their own phone, or whose phone or browser doesn't support every feature. Worth keeping in mind: older, lower-powered devices tend to run slower and can degrade the visitor's experience, so it's worth choosing reasonably current hardware even if it doesn't need to be top-of-line.
The software for Seba is free. However, Seba is currently powered by two AI systems.
1. Anthropic's Claude AI incurs a small, usage-based cost each time Seba generates a response. To put a number on it: consider an average visitor who views 15 exhibits and asks 3 follow-up questions per exhibit. Counting the automatic spoken introduction Seba gives for each exhibit, that's 4 AI responses per exhibit or 60 responses across the visit. Based on real, measured usage during development, each Claude response costs roughly $0.0069. For that visitor, a full visit comes to approximately $0.42. Scaled up, that's roughly $42 per 100 visitors per day or about $15,000 a year for a gallery seeing 100 such visitors daily. The $0.0069 figure comes from limited testing rather than a large-scale deployment. Real-world costs may be lower, since responses to popular exhibits will get reused efficiently across many different visitors' conversations throughout the day.
2. Voyage AI is used to identify exhibits related to the photos snapped on a visitors camera. Voyage's pricing works out to roughly $0.00003$0.0012 per photo. This works out to about $2000 a year.
There is always a price to performance tradeoff: there are several free AI services available that have not yet been tested. The reliability, restrictions and response quality of these services need be checked. Lastly, the speech recognition function can be greatly improved, at a cost, with Wispr Flow.
One more thing worth considering, once Seba is running well on the gallery floor: the same approach could be extended naturally to the museum's public website.
Many museum websites fall into one of two unsatisfying extremes for exhibit information: a single thin paragraph that leaves a curious visitor wanting more, or a dense scholarly PDF that only a specialist would read start to finish. Either way, the page is static it says the same thing to every visitor, and there's no way to ask it the one question you actually have.
Imagine instead a visitor browsing the collection from home, touching a photo of an exhibit on their screen, and simply starting a conversation about it the same guide, the same adaptive depth for a curious teenager or a specialist, available to anyone researching the collection at any hour, not only to people standing in the gallery.
The appealing part is that this wouldn't mean starting over: the exhibit content built for Section 1 the venue overview, the per-exhibit detail, the connections between related pieces is exactly what would power this too. The same investment would do double duty.