Our TomTom 930 GO GPS is an amazing device; it has replaced Diane, our non-updateable “training wheels” GPS that we bought some time ago1. Diane convinced us that a GPS is a good thing to have, so we bought the TomTom prior to the Search for America Tour’s jaunt to Chicago last summer.
We always choose the text to speech2 conversion option on the TomTom, preferring more information to spoken voice quality. The pre-recorded human voices don’t deal with exit numbers, street names, etc., particularly well. TTS at least attempts to render the text instructions in an intelligible format3. The default voice of the TomTom is a computer-rendered voice named Susan, a pleasant enough TTS voice, which unaccountably started breaking up, to the point of being unintelligible, when reading sufficiently long passages of text.
This afternoon, I updated the unit via TomTom Home. I ran disk repair on the device, and for good measure, downloaded a new TTS computer voice named Dave, and made his voice the default TTS converter. We just took Dave for a spin on a short trip to pick up some supplies beer. And he did well. I just wish he’d said:
And now, friends and neighbors, turn right.
Podcast listeners will be in stitches.
-k-
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Funny. Does “Dave” sound that much like our podcast buddy Dave?
PJ:
Not that much, actually. It was wishful thinking on my part. I could hear out podcast buddy’s voice in my head, though.
-k-