Create your own computer voice??

[Lionheart]

Hi there!

I bought a TomTom GO 930 a couple of weeks ago and I think it's fantastic. But the only thing bothering me is that I can't use computer voices because I live in Sweden and it sounds really weird with a english voice when prononcing swedish street names and even swedish words.

Is there a way to create your own computer voice? I emailed TomTom but I don't think there is a swedish computer voice. So if there was a way creating one it would be great.

Regards
Dennis from Sweden

 

[dhn]

I think the best you can do now is use your own voice to record warnings. I believe if you select that option, there are about 50 different warnings you can record. Of course, you won't be able to include street names but the announcements you hear when using a non computer voice can be replicated by you.

 

[Lionheart]

Hi again, thanks for your reply. I don't quite follow you. How do I record warnings? I have a swedish voice telling me directions, like turn right, turn left and so on. I also recorded my own voice for these directions but I would like to use the other features like street names and other warnings and it seems like without a swedish computer voice, I can't use them.

 

[dhn]

Yeah, street names seem out of the question until TomTom includes a Swedish computer voice.

 

[Arno]

Yeah, street names seem out of the question until TomTom includes a Swedish computer voice.

Dennis,
The human voices take up about 700 KB each. The .bin file for the Kate computer voice is about 37,150 KB.
If you could decompose the bin file that would still be an awful lot of work to create a computer voice file.
Cheers,

 

[brownbutgreen]

Heck, the English (UK or US) computer voice speaks the English street names funny a lot of the time too so you are not alone.

 

[cputrdoc]

Yeah, street names seem out of the question until TomTom includes a Swedish computer voice.

It's not even that -- TomTom doesn't make computer voices. They make navigation software. It's good enough to play a recorded sound clip when needed (human recorded voices), but when a computer voice is requested, it issues a command to Loquendo's speech engine, licensed and redistributed with TomTom products. Unlike TomTom, Loquendo's specialty is text-to-speech, they know nothing or little about navigation, and you'll find plenty of threads here to suggest that the speech engine receives not just the street name to pronounce, but some sort of pronunciation guide stored in the maps. (if there's still remaining doubt, I'll tell you right know there's a typo for a street near where I work -- it ends the destination name with the number 3, which doesn't appear anywhere on my display!)

So to get a Swedish computer voice, you would first need to convince Loquendo to support the language, and then convince TomTom to license it and install Swedish pronunciations in their maps. So far, it appears Loquendo supports English, Italian, German, Spanish, and French. Alternately, see if you can get them to use an additional text-to-speech (TTS) engine that already supports Swedish, but you'll still need the pronunciation data.

 

[dhn]

Yep, absolutely........I remember seeing somewhere a long time ago a post by someone who had somewhat broken down the code for computer speech functionality. Quite interesting, actually.

Garmin models have a tool (3rd party) where you can modify the computer speech provided. Unfortunately, nothing like that exists for TT's computer speech ..... not that I've been able to find, anyway.

 

[TurboCCC]

Is there any tools available on the TomTom to split/merge the .chk files? I know I have the splitter, but what about the merger? If there is some demand, I could write the program to merge all the .ogg files after recording.

 

[SpeckyTechie]

Thats a shame I was hoping to do a few of my own as the street name pronouncation does get on your nerves, but i know you can make your own other vioices for general directions.