01What it does on a drive
Place-based facts
As you near a Wikipedia-worthy spot, Road Nerd pre-loads the article, scores it against your interests, and reads the best one when you cross a geofence.
Town & county stories
When you cross into a new municipality or county, Road Nerd plays a short, documentary-toned narration about where you've arrived.
Plays nice with your music
It ducks under your podcast or music with a clean handoff, requests audio focus the same way navigation apps do, and steps aside for phone calls.
License-plate game
A built-in 50-states-plus-DC plate game with optional shared sessions for passengers — the driver keeps both hands on the wheel.
Silent mode
Prefer not to be interrupted? Run a drive in silent mode and Road Nerd still tracks the places you pass through and plates you spot, without speaking a word. Browse what you missed when you're parked.
02How it works
The app pre-fetches articles within roughly 10 km of you and lays down a bubble of geofences — a tight ring around real points of interest, plus a coarser ring to cover gaps where there's nothing nearby. Crossing any of them is the cue to speak.
Generation and synthesis happen on a small backend, not on your phone: text comes from Google's Gemini, audio from Google Cloud Text-to-Speech. Results are cached by content (not by you), so a popular town is generated once and then served straight from the cache.
Drive history — every place you've been, every fact you've heard, every plate you've spotted — stays on your device. It is never uploaded.
03About privacy
Road Nerd is a personal project and tries to keep its data footprint small. Location is used while you're driving, and is sent to the server only to resolve "what's here" — never stored as a location history. There are no user accounts, no logins, and no ads. A per-install token (the server keeps only its hash) lets the backend apply rate limits without knowing who you are.
The full privacy policy spells out every external service the app talks to, what each one sees, and how long anything is kept.
04Status
Road Nerd is a personal project built by Pinney Consulting. It is not currently published on the Google Play Store and is not accepting public sign-ups. This page exists to document the app and host its privacy policy.
05Contact
General questions: roadnerd@pinneyconsulting.com
Privacy questions: privacy@pinneyconsulting.com