Re: Garmin Voice S Celebrity Voices For Gps
Jocelin Taylor
A while back, I set out on making a Chilli voice for my Garmin GPS. It seemed like a good idea, considering they used to sell celebrity voices (like Cookie Monster and Homer Simpson). Those are long gone, but they still have up the software used to make the voices, and you can conveniently import .WAVs. So for the past 2 weeks, I've been taking audio of the episodes and cutting out clips of lines (such as "five" and "turn left"). I've only so far used "Taxi", but I'm open to help on finding episodes with lines that I can use. Once I finish, I'm definitely posting it to r/bluey so that others can have Chilli guide them places.
VoiceSkins, which produces "licensed real celebrity GPS voices for TomTom," added Snoop Dogg to its roster alongside Dan Castellaneta as both Homer Simpson and Mr. Burns in 2009. Since then, dozens of famous voices have been made available to TomTom users, including Burt Reynolds, Kim Cattrall, Bugs Bunny, Mr. T and Darth Vader.
that most celebrity GPS voices are non-TTS ... they will not speak street names. So you get
"Turn left in 500 feet" instead of
"In 500 feet, turn left on Maple Boulevard".Yeah. While a novelty, it's also a leap backward. I often need to hear the street name.
that most celebrity GPS voices are non-TTS ... they will not speak street names. So you get
"Turn left in 500 feet" instead of
"In 500 feet, turn left on Maple Boulevard".That raises an interesting question. How long does it take a voice actor to put together a TTS/street name sound file? I assume they're recording just phonetic sounds that the GPS can string together for street names in addition to the side comments, but still, I wonder how long it takes and how boring it is.
Sgt. R. Lee Ermey--and that's how he spells it by the way--(he'll be along to make any disrespectful numbnuts who can't get that spelling straight drop and give him 20 ;-)--would be my choice as well. I've seen a celebrity impersonation GPS voice file for him, but I didn't think it sounded like the real Sarge.
I had no idea you could get celebrity voices for your GPS navigation device. There's Mr. T ("what does he say if you need to go to the airport?"), Yoda, KITT from Knight Rider, Michael Caine, Kim Cattrall, the Star Trek computer voice, Homer Simpson, Gary Busey, and Dennis Hopper.
I'm sure many of you have a Sat Nav (Satellite Navigation) tool, such as a TomTom or Garmin device. You probably realise that you can change the voices, but maybe you haven't been bothered to do so yet because you thought it would be too much effort.
Since I have a TomTom, I'll take you through the process quickly. If you have the TomTom setup software installed on your computer, plug your TomTom in and start it up. Navigate the menus to voices (the voice option is shown at every step). You'll be shown a huge collection of voices, starting with premium content, popular freebies (like Hungarian Grandmother) and moving on to community voice files which are free. To install a free voice, just click on "Add" to the right of the detail. It's really that simple!
Here's TomTom's collection of downloadable voice files. TomTom do have a free voice section on their website, but it's currently just listing different languages and accents. However, if you browse the voices on your TomTom computer software you'll find there's plenty to choose from already which came as default options.
Sat Nav Voices offer plenty of free sat nav voice files, plus a few cheap voices for you to consider. They've recently made free a "Dangerous Steve" voice which is in honour of Steve Irwin. All of these are made with voice actors, but they're quite good.
Celebrity voices has nothing for free, but offers plenty of voice files for TomTom and Garmin dirt cheap. Voice files are made using voice actors doing imitations of Jason Statham, Elvis, Jack Nicholson & Doc Emmet Brown and more. There's a great variety of interesting voices here.
Pig Tones has nothing for free, but does offer some rather cheap voices. All of them are done with voice actors imitating the originals, but they are pretty good and give you some more variety to consider.
GPS Data Team has a list of free downloadable voice files for many Sat Nav types. It's very straightforward and gimmick-free, but mainly only features voices you can get at their original sites as shown above. Occasionally you can find voices on GPS Data Team which may have been available elsewhere for free as a promotion at some stage, but has now gone up to regular price. For instance, GPS Data Team has Darth Vader for free, which is normally $12.95 at other sites.
Drivers who use a GPS navigation device have recently been spicing up their driving experience by downloading celebrity voices for their journeys. Snoop Dogg famously lent his voice to TomTom, giving the Dutch navigation device and software maker an opportunity to sell a premium (and very chilled) service to it customers.
A few middlemen are capitalising on the market for premium services, and celebrity voices in particular . One is Navtones, and another is Locutio Voice Technologies, whose revenue has grown from 40,000 in 2007, to 750,000 in 2010; it is forecasting sales of 1.3 million next year. The U.K. company negotiates a complex business of software development, sound engineering and entertainment production, and works exclusively with TomTom.
It counts the Snoop Dogg among its offerings, but its main focus is big-ticket franchises like The Simpsons, Star Wars and Looney Tunes. A franchise of voices like these can be three-times more profitable than a celebrity thanks to the prospect of being translated into multiple languages--believe it or not, consumers in Germany or France recognize the dubbing actors.
"Seeing Dan Castanella [the voice of Homer Simpson] reading out directions for us in the studio was a turning point for me," says Locutio's CEO Chris Hilton of the experience earlier this year. He got the idea for his company in 2004 after chatter with some friends in a pub led to the question of why no one was putting famous voices in a GPS unit.
He asked a friend to hack into TomTom's GPS software, which was available online. "It was easy. The files were packaged up as a CHK file so we could see the navigation commands and get a script," says Hilton. He got around 20 voices to (badly) impersonate famous names like Ozzy Osbourne and put them on CDs to sell through British retail chain Homebase. "We did it first, and asked for permission later," Hilton adds.
Today Locutio and TomTom split the revenue 50/50 for their sales of famous voices on the VoiceSkins Web brand and TomTom site. Each voice for the TomTom personal navigation device (PND) costs $13 while a Star Wars app for the iPhone (available since May) costs about $5. There have been "tens of thousands" of downloads of the Star Wars app, while unit sales of Homer Simpson's voice for the PND was "a strong six-figure sum," according to Hilton.
Currently, amidst the requests he's getting from a stars in the movie and music industry--including one well-known puppeteer--Hilton is in talks with mobile app developers in North America and Israel about licensing his voices to use in downloads with their navigation apps, and with a large mobile-phone maker in Europe.
There are no plans to bring Snoop Dogg to TomTom's mobile navigation app, but Locutio wants to make him available on smartphones eventually, along with all the other famous voices in his portfolio. Just one caveat: all the voices would have to be re-recorded because mobile commands are slightly different to those on a TomTom or Garmin device. That could take a while.
Why might I have false memories about celebrity speech synthesis? Well, in the late 1980s, when I still worked at Bell Labs, I spent a week in Denver recording a (minor) celebrity voice. The speaker was a woman working at a country music radio station, who had previously recorded the messages and prompts for AT&T's AUDIX voicemail system, for which the engineering development was then done at the Western Electric facility in Denver. The AUDIX people wanted to see if they could add general text-to-speech capability using the same voice.
Those of us who can't stand the patronizing GPS voice, which guides us in calm, soothing tones while quietly judging our navigational handicap, now have a reason to celebrate. NavTones, the company that provides celebrity voices for portable GPS devices, has just added a new voice to its collection: none other than Gary Busey.
All NavTones celebrity GPS voices are authentic and original, offering turn-by-turn directions that are sprinkled with their own unique witticisms. The company's aim is to provide an alternative to the traditional GPS voice, which is "universally despised and devoid of personality."
Other celebrity voices include David Hasselhoff (who routinely says "hoff" instead of "off"), Mr. T (this one's obvious), Dennis Hopper, Burt Reynolds, Flavor Flav, talking car KITT (Ha, ha...), and more.
VoiceSkins.com currently offers the original Homer Simpson voice for sale, recorded by Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Snoop Dogg, the official Star Wars voices and now the classic Looney Tunes characters. More high-profile branded celebrity voice content is set to be launched throughout Q4 2010. See www.VoiceSkins.com (and their official YouTube Channel) and www.Locutio.co.uk for further details.
These "Voice Skins," which sell for $12.95 apiece, take the place of the stock voices contained in your TomTom. (Actually, you can switch back and forth between voices as desired.) The only downside is that you lose out on street names: Instead of hearing, say, "Turn left on Maple Road," you'll hear, "Take the next left."
You can load voices on pretty much every TomTom GPS made in the last few years. Personally, if I was shopping for a new nav system, I'd choose a TomTom over a Garmin or Magellan solely so I could listen to Mr. Burns tell me where to go.
Lord Vader and Yoda are not the first fictional characters Garmin has offered for download: It still has Dora the Explorer and Spongebob Squarepants voices available for $6 as well. And there are many third party sites that offer celebrity and character voices for both Garmin and rival TomTom: Services like Spot It Out and NavTones have options like Burt Reynolds, KITT from Knight Rider, and, my personal favorite, Flavor Flav (uh, NSFW).
aa06259810