Garmin nuvi 800 Has Speech Recognition – Just Like Star Trek

Computer..

(computer makes noises)

Main Engineering

(Turbolift takes you to Main Engineering)

Okay, seriously.. this literally is just like the Turbolift on the USS Enterprise 1701-D. Except it’s in your car.

Way cool.

I dig the fact it’s available. I dig the fact you have to manually "tell" the nuvi to listen via the small remote button (saves from mistakes being accidentally made).

What I don’t dig is that speech recognition is generally one of those things that’s cool but at the same time unbelievably annoying. No one has ever been able to get speech recognition quite right. Chances are you’ve used something that has it. As a matter of fact I’ve personally tested speech on software like the Opera web browser (and did a video on it). You probably used it a few times, said "Eh.. it’s okay" and then went back to the regular way via keystrokes, buttons or what-have-you to operate whatever it was.

You will notice the person in the video is sitting in a dead-quiet office environment and is speaking slowly and clearly.

Yes, this is same environment (sound-wise) in your car – when stopped and with the windows rolled up.

How would the nuvi handle ambient noise? No one knows just yet.

Is the speech recognition a good selling point of this nuvi 800?

It isn’t for me. Maybe it’s nice to have but I don’t really see the value or convenience of it.

Car-makers have tried, several times, to make talking/listening cars common. Each time they tried, no one liked it.

Maybe this is a presumptuous opinion on my part, but I don’t think this feature is "gotta-have" on anyone’s list concerning automotive GPS devices.

What is gotta-have is a better map updating system; something Garmin still needs to attend to post-haste.

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Tom Mariner
I was the first to put speech recognition and synthesis into a car 20 years ago. (A voice controlled cruise control) I can’t imagine that the state of the art has not progressed further than it has. I own and love a Nuvi 660 but recognize that touching a screen while driving is not conducive to avoiding collisions. So when the 800 with recognition was announced, I got exited.
Then the reviews came in stating that the unit generally only followed the button pushes and used no intelligence in its use of commands. With a 400 MHz Arm available for processing, it really ought to be able to figure out what I want to do if I say, “I want to go to 125 East End Avenue” instead of saying exact command words and telling it that I don’t mean the East End Avenue 2000 miles away.
And the part about the speech recognition in a varying car noise profile was solved by us that long ago — We trained the thing in a convertible stopped with the top up (dead silent) and it still worked reasonably well at 70 with the top down. The main problem we had was that with all that wind noise, a persons voice changes its pitch and inflection to be recognized by other people. Have we really forgotten how to do that? We are receiving faint spread spectrum signals from space on a software radio and deciding where we are on the surface of the earth and we can’t put a bit of AI into the thing?
And it ain’t just Garmin — At least they tried.