TTS_Speech_Doctor - orthophonist for your GPS

Around Des Moines, IA there's a "George M Mills Civic Parkway" that the Nuvi calls "George the 1000th Mills..." - a quirk for sure - and a source of amusement.

I've had my nuvi think "BR" was branch, instead of business route.

I like it when it says Doctor, it gives me a laugh...I still get where I am going. Sometimes I just turn off the sound though, it seems to make me turn a road too early unless I am reading street names.

Will this work with 6xx series?
There is no mention of the 6xx series at all on the web page.

There is no context sensitivity...

For example, "Continue 1 km on Main St to St Anne's" produces directions with Main Street and Street Anne's.

St is always pronounced Street.

Unmodified, Daniel would say "Continue 1 km on Main Saint to Saint Anne's"

This isn't a lot of help for those of us who live in Street Petersburg

Try it. It should work. In any cases, the program will not modify the VPM unless it finds the exact string.

All this comes from the map files. There is no uniformity. Normally, Sainte-Anne should be "Ste-Anne" or "St-Anne" and the "-" should make the difference.

I could make an entry for "Main St" to say "Main Street" but it would only apply to that street.

Reading your post and others, I think it will be more difficult than I thought to find a perfect solution. Still, I will thnink about all of this.

The perfect solution would be to modify the map files, but parsing them will take me too much time.

yes! "BR" is "Branch" in the table.

When the replacement text is longer than the original text, I need to modify another existing entry with more characters. Sometimes, it is hard to find which entry I should remove to add a new one. I can create a problem elsewhere. See the Saint/Street problem.

In any cases, I provide a checkbox in the program for those who do not want the change.

Will your program correct "arriving at Ramada Inn" from being pronounced as:" arriving at TRAMADA Inn"

I have been using the JILL voice on my 760 since about April. I wanted to try your program to increase the voice speed, but cannot find that voice or any other on my computer. I've searched for *.VPM and *.TTS and Jill.* and cannot find any voice files to modify. Thanks for any help you can provide.

jjc715,

No. Ramada is a word in the map file and your gps pronounces the best it can. It is making a sound liaison between "at" and "Ramada" and makes it sound like "Tramada". We could make an entry, but what phoenem to use for "R" that would not sound like "TR"? I suggest you use TTSVoiceEditor and search for "arriving at" and replace it by "arriving at,". The "," should create a pause that will prevent your gps from making the liaison.

baabm,

The VPM voices are on your GPS in the Garmin/Voice directory!!! You need to copy the one you want to modify on your computer.

Some new abbreviations added in v0.30:

- Change "Br" to "Business Road" instead of "Branch" (Jack & Jill only)
- Change "Cl" to "Clinic" instead of "Close" (Karen & Lee only)
- Change "O" to "West" instead of "Oest" (Julie & Felix only)
- Change "Boul." to "Boulevard" instead of "Boul+pause" (Julie & Felix only)

Yup, that's how she says it instead of "Washington."

But I'm not entirely sure if I'd correct it. It's kind of fun to hear her tell me to turn right onto "Western Australia 14" instead of "Washington 14."

We have a rural road named "Route E66" that sounds like "Rudy 66" on the nuvi 350.

RT

Jill kept insisting that Corey St. here in St. Petersburg was "Caudry" However Karen gets it perfectly. Karen is my new girlfriend now.

Is married with child. http://www.thegpsgirl.com/Site/Welcome.html

would this work on 350 models?

Garmin nuvi 350?

Yes, it will.

I recall seeing this highway in Connecticut being referred to as "West Cross Parkway" instead of "Wilbur Cross Parkway".

On a similar note, I remember seeing a POI file (don't remember which one) on this site where the strings "North", "South", "West", and "East" were replaced by the letter N, S, W, and E, even where it wouldn't be appropriate. For example, the town Easton would appear as "Eon"; likewise, Weston appears as "Won". Street names that had the words Northern or Southern would appear as "Nern" or "Sern".

v0.31 - Added patch for "HWY" to say "Highway" instead of "H-W-Y" (Daniel & Emily only)

dconsolla,

On the display, the gps is pretty creative when it comes to make it fit to the screen... Ovce I saw the gps make some abbreviations to the screen that were affecting the voice.

For example, the map file contains BOULEVARD JOHN, the display shows BOUL JOHN and the voice says BOUL JOHN. Pretty annoying. Looks like a similar issue here with Wilbur Cross Parkway.

FWIW.
BR is Business Route, not road.
I guess that's better than branch.

The program change it to Business ROUTE, not Road. Just a typo in the post above and in the readme. I will correct it.

Your other tool was very useful and I congratulate you on your attempt on this one but it looks a lot more difficult from the comments I see. I'm not sure I want to use the corrections since the "speech impediments" provide a little humor to the trip.

I would like ask that you add this to your "when you get around to it" list: Can you have "HOV" pronounced as three separate letters rather than as a one-syllable word?

This download looks to be quite helpful in reducing TTS annoyance levels. Thanks for all your efforts.

Most probably, but...

What is HOV? Which language? How can I find it?

It's an abbreviation for High Occupancy Lane

Please give me a language, country, a city and an intersection where I can hear HOV. I need this to test. Thanks.

Turboccc has done more for our GPS community in two months than all of Garmin's software engineers have done in a year. We should have Garmin hire him. Maybe he could fix the 7xx problems!

You're better than Garmin. When will the turboccc gps come out?

I know that one other issue is "conn" says Connecticut instead of connector for roads.

Yes, I have to agree

My 660 with the Emily voice often thinks bridge (BR) is branch. I kind of enjoy the error. She also had a problem pronouncing La Cienega Boulevard, but again, its sort of amusing.

Wonderful, yet another fix that of course I'm gonna have to get and spend 3-4 days to figure out how to make it work... Not like I have nothing else to do!

Seriously, thanks once again turbo. Amazed that Garmin hasn't come up with these fixes themselves. Guess they figure as long as you're doing it for free why should they hire someone and pay for the fixes themselves.

English, USA, Phoenix Arizona, travel westbound on Interstate Highway 10 to the intersection of Third and Moreland Streets.

This may not need to be mentioned, but make sure that HOV avoidance is off.

Thanks for looking into this.

Hi PaulATL,

Can you specify which language, city, intersection, ... so I can experience the problem and provide a fix.

Thanks.

Hi Fishpaw,

I know why the gps is getting confused! LOL! I just made "Br" as "Business Route" instead of "Branch"., but now it needs to be a "Bridge" LOL!

Hi Felix Krull,

Thanks. I will look into it tomorrow. I am exhausted tonight.

Thanks for the vote of confidence! LOL!

Keep up the good work.
How about changing CR to Creek.
Jack just says the letters instead of creek.

thanks

My Nuvis will correctly pronounce CR-13 as County Route 13. Hopefully, seeing the -xx after CR will retain this.

I should give this a go considering that the Nuvi 255 likes to pronounce certain things such as Expressway(Expwy) a bit odd.

- Change "AUT" to "Highway" instead of "A-U-T" (Daniel & Emily only, French countries)
- Change "O" to "West" instead of "O" (Daniel & Emily only, French countries)
- Change "Boul." to "Boulevard" instead of "Boul+pause" (Daniel & Emily only, French countries)

Sorry, I forgot "HOV" and "CR" as "Creek" and "CONN". I need to investigate them before proposing a change.

turboccc, I just want to say how incredible and amazing that amount of work you are putting into these updates is. You rock!! And I'm not even using the program yet.

But just trying to follow all the changes you have made in a relatively short period of time makes me tired.

Thanks for being a part of our community.

I have difficulty keeping track too! LOL! I am getting requests from everywhere.

Back to HOV. Found it! According to Google, HOV stands for "High Occupancy Vehicle Road". Do you want that or "High Avoidance Road"? Both are pretty long to say.

Personnally, I like the current pronounciation for HOV (hove)... I can also make it say "H-O-V" which would sound nice too and much faster to say than "High Occupancy Vehicle Road"

I vote for "H-O-V"

I've never heard one called out with the full description. They were called "H-O-V" both in Houston and in Denver.

Now, Denver has an "H-O-T" lane, which is "high occupancy toll," where a driver without a passenger may use the HOV lane by paying toll.

Karen calls all tollways, including the HOT, "The Lexus Lanes."

Go for H-O-V. It sounds a bit like "anchovies" (without the s) but I guess it is ok.

Last one for the night. I am currently posting v0.41.

Sorry about these "small-step" releases. I am never sure if wife&kids will let me enough time to complete something. I also count on you to test a bit more and let me know if all is ok.

If you ask for a change and don't see it coming, it may be because I forgot about it. Do not hesitate to ask again.

Coming so far: CONN & Creek.

when i go to run it gives me a tabctl.ocx 32 error?file missing

Hi,

The error message appears when the tabctl.ocx file needs to be updated, is missing or damaged. These ActiveX components are used by most software applications and are present in most windows operating systems. Occasionally the .ocx file needs to be replaced because they are damaged or outdated.

Here is the file: http://www.rmfc.us/photos/tabctl32.ocx

Copy it to C:\windows\system32
Then press the windows start button and click on run
type "regsvr32 C:\Windows\System32\tabctl32.ocx" and click OK.

Hope this helps
Mike

I know I only pointed out and didn't exactly ask, but are you working on WA=Washington for Karen?