Seba

A photo-based museum guide

Seba lets a visitor identify any exhibit on view by photographing it — no QR code, no app download, no account creation. It then plays a short spoken introduction and starts a conversation with the visitor and lets them ask ask questions.

PUAM already has a digital guide in Smartify, launched with the Museum’s reopening. This isn’t a pitch to replace it — it’s a look at what a photo-based, conversational layer could add, particularly for the dense-display cases.

How they compare

	Seba	Smartify at PUAM today
Exhibit recognition	Any angle, any photo — no marker needed	QR codes placed in the galleries
Visitor interaction	Spoken intro, then open-ended follow-up conversation	Label text and provenance, on request
Personalization	Age group, knowledge level, length, language	Not evident in the current deployment
Platform cost	Free, minor operating costs for AI — runs on PUAM’s own infrastructure	Published small-institution rate: £1,500/yr; Actual cost may be more
Visitor data	Nothing is collected.  It is intentionally unintrusive and light weight.	Accounts, cookies, and engagement messaging referenced in Smartify’s own materials
Where data lives	Princeton’s own servers	Smartify’s infrastructure
Feature iteration speed	Swift changes — it can be Princeton’s own code	Subject to vendor roadmap and support cycle

Where Seba adds something new

· No QR code on the exhibits. Densely packed cases may not have space for large readable labels. Seba sees the exhibit itself — no labels or QR codes to print, place, or replace when a gallery is rehung.

· A visitor can actually ask questions. Today’s guide delivers label text and provenance. Seba has a real back-and-forth — “why does this matter,” “what else is like this” — with an answer grounded in the Museum’s own material.

· It adjusts to who’s standing there. Age group and knowledge level, set by the visitor. A scholar and a ten-year-old get different answers to the same exhibit.

· Nothing leaves Princeton. No visitor accounts, no vendor infrastructure, no third party in the data path. The Museum owns the code, the content, and the visitor’s experience of both.

What Smartify still does well

· Reach. Over 700 partner institutions and roughly two million active users — a visitor may already have the app from another museum.

· Breadth. Maps, wayfinding, accessibility features (audio description, sign-language tours), and e-commerce — none of which Seba attempts today.

· It’s already live. Staff are trained on it and content is already in place. Seba is a proof of concept, not yet a production system.

A modest first step

A short pilot — one gallery, or specifically the dense-case exhibits — would let PUAM see the difference firsthand without touching what’s already working.