

The Uninterrupter: GPS that sings along with your car stereo - ashearer
http://evolver.fm/2010/10/20/gps-that-sings-along-with-your-car-stereo/

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yellowbkpk
The sound samples were horrible. I couldn't understand the "singing" voice at
all. I think this would be more distracting due to the uncanny valley ("Was
that directions or road noise or the actual song?").

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ashearer
As the author, I certainly agree that this isn't useful yet in anything like
its current form.

Intelligibility was one of my biggest concerns while making the hack: singing
can be harder to understand than speech. On the other hand, the vocabulary is
limited. Phrases like "turn left" and "turn right" are easily distinguishable,
and other unobtrusive audio cues could make it clear that the words came from
the GPS. Over the course of the hack day, intelligibility improved
dramatically as I tweaked parameters.

Mainly, this is an experiment, and there are lots of ways to improve on the
first day's results to make it more practical. Instead of following the melody
exactly, the pitches could be chosen from a limited range to be consonant with
the song. That would split some of the difference between traditional GPS
speech and these results. Also, Yamaha has apparently withheld their higher-
quality Vocaloid voices from the free Canoris API, so there's potential for
improvement there as well. (The documentation warns that the initial release
of the free voices works better in Spanish.)

Even more practically, the GPS could use the timing information to slip in
spoken directions at less distracting moments, like a human companion might.

~~~
shadowflit
>> Even more practically, the GPS could use the timing information to slip in
spoken directions at less distracting moments, like a human companion might.

I really like that idea. Of course, the GPS tends to be a bit of a nag, so it
might be hard for it to find enough pauses.

I don't have my GPS integrated with the car, so I can just let the GPS audio
compete with the car audio, and adjust GPS volume to mess with the
intrusiveness factor. After listening to the original sample... wow that would
annoy me a lot.

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ashearer
This is from Boston Music Hack Day. Text and audio samples from the 2-minute
presentation are here: <http://blog.ashearer.com/music-hack-day-the-
uninterrupter>

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iwr
This is truly great, second only to a silent GPS navigator.

~~~
hugh3
I really like the new Jaguar XJ (not that I've driven it, but I've seen
pictures) where the dials in front of you are a screen, and when you approach
a turn one of the low-priority dials (fuel and temperature, I guess) becomes a
little round GPS screen to tell you which way to go.

I guess that will be common in a few years.

