Make a left in 100 yards, you will.
If there’s one thing I miss about the days before Google Navigation, it was tricking out my Tom Tom Navigator with custom voice prompts.
Voices like Austin Powers, Sean Connery era James Bond, Darth Vader, and of course the obligatory KITT from Knight Rider were all the rage on the internet, from official paid downloads to thousands of homemade, often poorly impersonated recordings. Either way, they were always a blast to get directions from, especially with passengers in the car who weren’t expecting it.
But some of my Garmin-toting friends back in the day used to ridicule it. They’d say Tom Tom’s custom voices were a fun gimmick, but a real navigation unit should be more focused on clear, concise, and accurate directions than gimmicks. The truth is, Garmin did offer a way to record your own voice, as well as a few choices in custom recordings, but nothing like the community and celebrity driven madness that was the Tom Tom community. At first I dismissed my friends as being jealous of all the options we Tom Tom owners had, until one day it hit me while listening to directions from what was clearly a scrawny white guy pretending to be MC Hammer: maybe this had gone too far.
Fast forward to current day. Garmin has announced on their blog that they now have official Lucasfilm-approved premium voice downloads for Darth Vader and Yoda. This follows their recent additions of Spongebob Squarepants and Dora the Explorer. It looks like having goofy custom voices isn’t beneath Garmin after all.
After listening to the demonstration for Yoda’s audio, I must admit the prompts and intonation are top notch. They did a good job making it sound like the Jedi master is speaking to you conversationally rather than a series of repetitive recordings. He even adds in the occasional “Yes…Yes” and “Your destiny, it is”, which really appeals to the geek in me.
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU8tbg8guUI&feature=player_embedded’]
But let’s be honest, Yoda’s cryptic speaking style that reeks of poor grammar and confusing placement of subjects/verbs might sound epic on screen, but actually makes it rather difficult to follow for directions. I don’t know about anyone else, but I think listening to this would be infuriatingly frustrating while lost.
Meanwhile, I wonder what those Tom Tom haters would say to all this now. On second thought, they’re probably all using their phones as navigation devices these days anyway.
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