Garmin English-language voice versions and dates

That's great. My guess is that the majority of Garmin 'On The Road' device buyers know nothing about adding extra Real Directions English language voices and settle for Samantha or Sanjeeta. Those voices do the job but it's always nice to have extra choices.

Thanks for confirming the stock voices included with a North America Drive 60.

Thanks, too, for reporting your internal memory. I've reported your results to the thread of memory offered and expect it'll be added to the Garmin FAQ soon. Yours is the first of the Drive models to have reported the storage capacity.

Forgot to mention that there were several Asian languages in the base set, but I had no way of telling what they were. I would assume Japanese, Chinese, and Korean?

I was hacking my in-car GPS (2015 Dodge Journey), since it seems that all FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) models imported into Australia do not have TTS with street names installed. The internal GPS inside my car is using a Garmin mini-PCB and it looks like a cut-down version of Nuvi 3750 or something very similar. However, it was cut down considerably.

Anyway, long story short, the only version of the voice files this beast accepts is TTS2 (I'm quite happy with Karen's TTS2 Australian voice ). It seems that the board is not powerful enough to process TTS3 voice DLLs, hence TTS2 is a compromise OEM are using in the in-car installs.

See:

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/46314

Our friend Karen along with several others have recently been updated for those interested:

https://www8.garmin.com/support/download_details.jsp?id=6487

http://www.gmaptool.eu/en/content/recent-updates

Thanks, canuk!

How exciting! OK, I'm easily amused. I'll update today and revise the FAQ if all works well. Golly, of all seven of the TTS3 voices, the five 2014 updates are improved now leaving only the two American voices from 2016 unchanged.

Well other than the voices I normally hear in my head, I'm quite happy with the standard Garmin voice.

In the past I've tried the English voice, the Australian voice, I'd even tried German and Spanish.

I just find using anything other than the regular USA voice I have to listen more extensively to what's being announced. Too distracting for me I find. In the USA English it just flows into my head.

I had some issues updating the five voice from their old version to the new ones.

What I found is that Garmin Express will only offer one of the five new updates, and even then, only if that voice is selected as the active voice. It make me think that to update all five of these new voices using Garmin Express, you will need to select each new voice (Serena, Lee, Sangeeta, Karen and Daniel) as the active voice and run Garmin Express five times with each selected voice to obtain its voice update.

One workaround is to instead to go Garmin Express' Optional Voice Updates and choose English but I found that GE states I have insufficient space even when I have 2-3 GB of space in the nuvi and oodles more on the PC running GE. Odd. I'd like to know your results if updating these five new TTS3 voices to your device. Did you have a problem? Did you succeed updating all and how did you do it?

I was able to use this method to download the 5 new voices on a clone of the DriveLuxe 50. The clone had about 5 GB of free space and GE did not give an insufficient space error.

I also applied the updates directly on my 3597 (not cloned) and also did not get the insufficient space message. That device only has about 250 MB of free space.

One thing I noticed is that the voice files on the DriveLuxe are named differently than on the 3597. For example, on the DriveLuxe Karen is named English_Australian_Karen_D4451-00_0210.vpm, while on the 3597 it is named English_Australian_Karen.vpm. The files are identical in size so I would guess they are the exact same file.

On my 3597, the one that didn't error out on me claiming insufficient storage, I was able to install all English language voices through GE's Optional/LanguageFiles/English selection. When I did this, then checked the various file names, these files contained the ............_Dxxxx-00_210.vpm following the name for TTS3 voices and ............_VCT210.vpm for the non-TTS voices: Jack, Karen, Daniel, Serena, Matilda, James, and Kate

while these named voice files (both TTS and non-TTS) did not have the added characters after the name: Michelle, Samantha, Lee and Sangeeta.

Now that's confusing.

I was able to copy all eleven voices to the other 3597 (that one that did error out due to "insufficient space") and they work well now too so it appears not to be a Garmin model issue since your 3597 has no added characters while my 3597 mostly has the added characters (seven of the 11 files). For what it's worth, on my 3597, you can only see the odd filenames when viewing the folder from a computer. The nuvi itself only displays the text name minus the added characters.

Also, in the past, the old WebUpdater program would update voices. I tried this past week to obtain all the new updates but found that WebUpdater did not offer them. It may be that WebUpdater is finally starting to lose its usefulness.

But Melaqueman, what if a Dudley Do-Right or Nell voice became available, eh?

Garmin Express is now offering v2.60 for Samantha and Jack.

Well done, alandb. Even the Polish http://www.gmaptool.eu/en/content/voice site doesn't mention either of these yet although if you do click the 2016 Samantha and Jack links, it takes you to the current 2018 updates for both.

What difference a day makes!

I did update my nuvi 3597 to the two new 2.60 voices but I had to run Garmin Express three times to do so.

-In my 1st attempt to get the new voices, my 3597 had Karen as my selected voice, and as I know to be the case and should have considered in advance, GE offered me nothing.
-After changing my selected voice to Samantha and running GE, I was offered the 2.60 Samantha update from its current 2.50 version.
-Then after changing the selected 3597 voice to Jack and re-running GE, I was offered the Jack 2.60 update.

For now I feel that all seven of my TTS3 voices are at their latest update. Whew, what a month it's been!

While on the subject of voices, if I wanted to free up some space on my Garmin Drive 50, could I delete all the other language files that I don't need such as like Chinese or Russian or whatever? As long as I stay in the USA there shouldn't be any reason my device would malfunction for removing those files, correct?

Thanks!

Yes, that's correct. I only have the two EN US voices on my unit. You can also delete all the text and keyboard files that aren't English, also.

The help and EULA files

As of today (10/4/18) Garmin Express is offering the V2.70 update to the TTS3 Samantha and Jack voices. I did not check to see if any of the other voices have updates.

Thanks,Webupdater as usual picked up both of the updates.