Meet Wrinkles, an AI app that uncovers the hidden stories of the places around you
A new app called Wrinkles uses your location to automatically surface stories about the places around you. Wrinkles, available on both iOS and Android, essentially acts as an AI-powered audio tour guide that reveals hidden history and local stories. The idea behind the app is to allow you to move through the world while hearing the places around you come to life without having to stare at your phone.
- ▪A new app called Wrinkles uses your location to automatically surface stories about the places around you.
- ▪Wrinkles, available on both iOS and Android, essentially acts as an AI-powered audio tour guide that reveals hidden history and local stories.
- ▪The idea behind the app is to allow you to move through the world while hearing the places around you come to life without having to stare at your phone.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/04/meet-wrinkles-an-ai-app-that-uncovers-the-hidden-stories-of-the-places-around-you/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:34:34 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-04T19:35:41.571Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-04T19:35:41.571Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | iEMz8vBe2cES · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A new app called Wrinkles uses your location to automatically surface stories about the places around you. Wrinkles, available on both iOS and Android, essentially acts as an AI-powered audio tour guide that reveals hidden history and local stories. The idea behind the app is to allow you to move through the world while hearing the places around you come to life without having to stare at your phone. As you explore, Wrinkles can tell you the secrets behind a building, the history of a street, and other local lore. Wrinkles was founded by David Stemler, a longtime advertising executive, and Ryan Hansan, who previously founded ScratchDC, a meal delivery service, and TasteLab, a shared commercial kitchen that helped independent food businesses launch and grow.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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