As my dad drove us to the airport for our trip to Orlando, I got the bright idea to see how many times in one week I would encounter speech technologies while on vacation. This occurred to me as my some what technophobe father let on that he likes the navigation system in his new car). Frankly, I was intrigued. He doesn’t mind listening to TTS?
On a previous trip to Phoenix, I had a similar idea when I stood there captive in the baggage area, waiting for my bag and listening to multiple repetitive warning messages spoken using TTS. I never did follow up to find out why they use TTS, but I had an inkling that maybe the airport uses it because it’s just different enough from the real thing that people will stop and listen to it. Some day I’ll ask.
Back to Orlando. My sum total of experiences with ASR or TTS in one week – one. I was surprised. We went to four amusement parks and multiple other locations and not once did I encounter speech technologies. Perhaps Disney doesn’t believe in speech.
The one notable exception was the TeleNav navigation application on my husband’s Blackberry, which came in handy numerous times. He had tried out TeleNav, which you can trial for free for a month, and then $9.99 after, and had questioned whether it was worth it compared to Google Maps, which he also uses on his phone. In his opinion, Google Maps provides superior search capabilities, but it gives the user only text directions or visual maps, which can be a real liability if you are driving. With the TeleNav application, we ended up with text, maps, and clear directions spoken in a clear voice. It is definitely worth checking out.
Now for the fun part, although you probably had to have been there to really appreciate it. If you want to drive a navigation system nuts, give it an address that is not yet in the database and ask it for directions. That is what we did. It got us just so far and then we drove past the turn. Yet it – or I should say she, since it was a female TTS voice, then started to back pedal. So did we. She said, “Reroute”. We realized we had missed the turn, whipped into a parking lot, and started to find an exit out that back so we wouldn’t have to do U-turns and sit at lights. She didn’t like that and started a frantic chirping of “Reroute”, “Reroute”, each turn we took. It was hilarious.
Previously, I’d only used the onboard navigation system as a passenger in other’s cars, and once in a rental. Using a handheld device that provides color maps and directions is a totally different experience. I’m sure I’ll be blogging in depth about these more once I investigate further. Next up, I’m going to try Dial Directions, which is a new free service in my area and a few others that is in Beta. It uses speech recognition for inputting your location and provides text directions in text messages on your cell phone without the requirement of a GPS. Stay tuned for more.