car computers

[deird1]

My parents gave me a GPS for (next) Christmas, and I've spent most of this week figuring out how it works.

I am, as you may have heard, very good at getting horribly lost while driving. Apparently, having a GPS doesn't fix this at all. I'm still just as horribly lost, but now I'm horribly lost in this weird way which involves knowing precisely where I am - and my lostness can best be seen in the fact that my GPS keeps re-calculating my route, triumphantly presenting a new one, and then, a few seconds* later, re-calculating yet again because I've just managed to go totally the wrong way again.

Really irritating having this fancy machine telling you precisely what you should be doing and somehow failing to follow its clear instructions.

* Not exaggerating. Every few seconds. Literally. I went into slightly the wrong street, got back into the new "right" street, drove fifteen metres, somehow ended up in the wrong lane, drove on the newly-calculated route for maybe five seconds, took the wrong turn...


In other GPS news:

The computer voice thinks that Waverley and Montague should be pronounced not as "WAY-ver-lee" and "MON-tag-yoo", but as "Wah-VER-lee" and "MON-tag". Weird.

It (helpfully) tells you the name of the road you're driving down. When, however, you're driving somewhere that isn't in its maps - like a carpark or driveway - it obviously doesn't know the name, so it starts saying "DRIVING ON ROAD". As opposed to driving on the footpath, or through a building, or in a river...

Comments

[smurasaki]

Now, if it ever does say "DRIVING IN RIVER" you'll know you're really lost.

[deird1]

Apparently the first GPSs in Melbourne did precisely that, for a while. We got a new tunnel that goes under the river - and none of the GPSs had been updated, so whenever people drove into the tunnel they'd get really frantic and start commanding you to turn back immediately.

[smurasaki]

Ahahaha! Poor GPS devices.

[slaymesoftly]

LOL the GPS voice in my system gets very impatient and cranky when she has to recalculate more than once or twice. "Recalulating..." said through obviously gritted teeth. It's funny and incredibly annoying at the same time.

[velvetwhip]

There's nothing quite like those computerized voices.



Gabrielle

[fenchurch]

When we first got our car GPS (as opposed to our hiking GPS), we actually tried setting it to an Australian voice... but, weirdly, that apparently makes it assume that the user will also be speaking with an Australian accent and it didn't seem to understand us half the time.

However, I still find some of its choices of pronunciation to be peculiar. Being Geocachers, we'll often enter in coordinates as a destination (since they're sometimes provided for parking near a Geocache) and it nearly always pronounces it "co-or-din-ATES" (like if you were coordinating a project) rather than the standard American "co-OR-din-its." I'm not entirely sure why the other pronunciation is even in there... it's not like a GPS should need to coordinate anything!

[immer_am_lesen]

What accent option have you chosen for your GPS? We have ours set to the Aussie guy, whose name is Lee.
Lee's a pretty cool guy, and is very patient with us when we keep ignoring his sound advice so the poor guy has to recalculate all the time.
But yes, his pronunciation is rather amusingly off at times. The only one I can think of right now is Wiltshire = (to him) wilt-sh-EYE-r, not 'wiltshir'. He seems to stress the completely wrong syllables. I'm told it's because he's not actually saying words, he's just cobbling together the appropriate sounds for the parts of the word...
We get along though. Mostly.

[thedreamer1985]

oh wow... the only GPS i ever used was my phone... and i never liked it or used it again... LOL

good luck getting used / learning how to use it!

[next_to_normal]

My GPS doesn't understand abbreviations. It pronounces "St." as saint instead of street, "Dr." as doctor instead of drive, and says things like "puh-kwee" trying to pronounce the abbreviation of parkway (Pkwy).

[lliira]

As someone who is also prone to getting horribly lost while driving, I sympathize. My mother learned a couple decades ago that this is actually genetic, and I was thrilled to hear it, because of how nasty people can be about it. Some of us are born with basically no sense of direction. It's one reason I want to move to a city with good community transportation and which is built for pedestrians, not cars.

[beroli]

When, however, you're driving somewhere that isn't in its maps - like a carpark or driveway - it obviously doesn't know the name, so it starts saying "DRIVING ON ROAD". As opposed to driving on the footpath, or through a building, or in a river...

It's a good thing I don't have one, because now, I'd be really tempted to drive through a building or in a river to see what it said.

[-sabik-.livejournal.com]

If you find the voice distracting or annoying, you can turn it off... (On my model, that involved downloading a new "voice" which is silent. Now it's carefully stringing together pieces of silence in the correct order.)

If you find the map distracting, you can set it to hide the map; then it'll just show an arrow and a distance and a street name, like your own little portable direction sign.


Don't stress about making it recalculate - that's what it's for!