Firmware

[dhn]

Success!!! It worked, all I needed was Vodka!! LOL, jk. I followed the method you described to uninstall the NA Map and then reinstall it. After the Reinstall the Spoken Address function worked perfectly!!! Thanks for all your help dhn, I really really appreciate it!! Im going to jump and my car now and give commands to my GO!! LoL. Thanks again.


--Ryan

Great news! But wait till the vodka wears off!

 

[badmanrc]

Great news! But wait till the vodka wears off!

Haha okay I will. Just one more thing for you information. Just incase someone else asks you it might be helpful to know. After I uninstalled the NA Map, I had to browse the interal hard drive and delete the NA map folder as there were still some files left over after the uninstalltion. Once i was finished with that I then reinstalled the map. Anyway, take care and thanks again.

--Ryan

 

[usil]

Activation of Speech recognition

dhn, I see you helped badmanrc with successfuly activating the speech recognition feature on his TOMTOM 720. I also have a 720 and want to do this.

Here is what I have:

1. I have the ASR folder with many files in it on the TomTom.
2. I added the .dat file to the folder and now see what badmanrc saw with the features there like his pictures. They do not work as his did not.
3. I rebooted the TomTOM with no change.
4. I noticed that when I added the speech feature to my quick menu and clicked on it I got a brief message at the top right of my TomTom screen that said - 'Speech recognition files not installed'.
5. Not sure how to check map and TomTom version but just bought it in early January.

Here is where I see things different.

1. I do not have any csspeech_(state).dat file in the ASP folder. (There are 47 files in the ASR folder)

I am not sure what to do at this point. I have backed up my TomTom and also made a complete copy of all files using Explorer and stored it in another location just to be safe.

Does there need to be a csspeech_(state) file for every state in the US or just one (I am in Texas)? If so maybe all I need are these files. Can these be zipped and sent to me to try?

I have not done the removing and reinstalling the NA map as felt this was premature.

Hope you can provide some guidance.

Thanks,

Usil

 

[dhn]

dhn, I see you helped badmanrc with successfuly activating the speech recognition feature on his TOMTOM 720. I also have a 720 and want to do this.

Here is what I have:

1. I have the ASR folder with many files in it on the TomTom.
2. I added the .dat file to the folder and now see what badmanrc saw with the features there like his pictures. They do not work as his did not.
3. I rebooted the TomTOM with no change.
4. I noticed that when I added the speech feature to my quick menu and clicked on it I got a brief message at the top right of my TomTom screen that said - 'Speech recognition files not installed'.
5. Not sure how to check map and TomTom version but just bought it in early January.

Here is where I see things different.

1. I do not have any csspeech_(state).dat file in the ASP folder. (There are 47 files in the ASR folder)

I am not sure what to do at this point. I have backed up my TomTom and also made a complete copy of all files using Explorer and stored it in another location just to be safe.

Does there need to be a csspeech_(state) file for every state in the US or just one (I am in Texas)? If so maybe all I need are these files. Can these be zipped and sent to me to try?

I have not done the removing and reinstalling the NA map as felt this was premature.

Hope you can provide some guidance.

Thanks,

Usil

You need this:
1. North America map version 7.10
2. Firmware version 7.221
3. A file called support_asr.dat with the value '1' (no quotes) in the asr folder. Make sure that Windows' setting is to show extensions for known file types to make sure your file is NOT really support_asr.dat.txt. That won't work.

The csspeech files are in the North America map folder, NOT the asr folder. You should see a file called csspeech_TX.dat that is about 43 megs in size.

To check what version of firmware you have, turn on your tomtom unit, touch the satellite bars, and the version will be shown there. Do not rely on information that is shown using TomTom home. It is always wrong (a known software bug).

To see what version of map you have, using Windows explorer or some other file manager, look at the files in your North America folder on your unit. There will be a file called North America.pna. Open it in Notepad. It will show a value just above a line that says Build =. The value should be 710.

All the above ingredients are necessary for Voice Recognition.

If indeed they are there, you then go: Navigate To--> Address --> Spoken Address (dialogue). The two icons for Spoken Address & Spoken Address (dialogue) should be lips which are not greyed out.

If you are this far and the Spoken Address (dialogue) icon is active, tap it and speak when given prompts.

I suspect at least one of the three requirements I listed above is not correct. Check what I asked and report back.

 

[usil]

Continuing to try to get speech recognition to work...

Thanks very much for trying to help me. I have checked for the information and find the following:

1. Just above the build I see this number: 710
2. Clicking on the sat bars I see: 7.220
3. There is no file csspeech_TX.dat and when I did a search for a file csspeech*.* it found no file.

So, no joy. Do the numbers I provide mean that this is older or newer map and file versions? How do I get the correct files to make this work?

Thanks for your kind assistance.

Usil

 

[dhn]

Thanks very much for trying to help me. I have checked for the information and find the following:

1. Just above the build I see this number: 710
2. Clicking on the sat bars I see: 7.220
3. There is no file csspeech_TX.dat and when I did a search for a file csspeech*.* it found no file.

So, no joy. Do the numbers I provide mean that this is older or newer map and file versions? How do I get the correct files to make this work?

Thanks for your kind assistance.

Usil

Just to confirm..........is it the North America 710 you have or the USA & Canada 710 map? The latter does not have the csspeech.dat files in the map folder.

 

[Rocha]

I am in the same boat. I followed all the instructions but in fact do not have the csspeech_TX.dat file. Where can we get it?

I must add, it is the North Americ map.

Thanks

 

[Rocha]

Finally got it to work. The correct spelling for the file name is cspeech_TX.dat and not csspeech_TX.dat and it was located in a prior version of my map. I either took it out myself to have enough room for the latest version of the NA map or it was taken out by an update (I doubt that however).

In any case I use the French language and it is not working very well...

 

[dhn]

Finally got it to work. The correct spelling for the file name is cspeech_TX.dat and not csspeech_TX.dat and it was located in a prior version of my map. I either took it out myself to have enough room for the latest version of the NA map or it was taken out by an update (I doubt that however).

In any case I use the French language and it is not working very well...

Coinsideration of Canadian needs (and detailed maps) has been noted as an apparent lower priority (it seems) with TomTom.

It has also been noted that French Canadians get even worse consideration (including no bilingual customer support).

 

[Gilbert]

Coinsideration of Canadian needs (and detailed maps) has been noted as an apparent lower priority (it seems) with TomTom.

It has also been noted that French Canadians get even worse consideration (including no bilingual customer support).

I could also add no user manual in French, the Montreal map is a shame with missing entrances to a main highway in existence for over 40 years right in the city (Metropolitain Boulevard aka Highway 40). Loquendo has French Canadian voices since July 2007 but yet to be made available by Tomtom. I wonder what fellow Americans would say if only British voices were available... "By Jove it's in the same bloody English language isn't it?" ;-) Trying to send an email when having chosen the French language for Home sends one to a blank page.

While I can express myself in English, I often dread spoken phone communications because I sometime have problems with thick accents or what some tech support people assume. In my last phone to tech support, she was asking me about my desktop and I did not get what she was referring to. I've been using PCs for over 20 years and never downloaded anything to my desktop nor have ever used Windows Explorer since I use Total Commander for all my file operations and been using it since beginning on NT. Before that I was an OS/2 user preceded by DOS. I would rather deal with tech questions by email but all she could suggest was writing to (e-mail address removed). I wrote about the possibility to get the French Canadian voices but the response was "Thank you very much for taking the time to contact TomTom Support with your suggestion for the development of more French Canadian computer voices feature on our systems. We frequently use customer feedback as an initiative to add or improve our navigational and usage features. Any suggestions made regarding our equipment or software will be forwarded to our product development team for review. Please let us know if you have additional suggestions or feedback." That was January 28th and have not heard anything since.

As for French street names support, I'm finding weird things such as ?Mont?e St-Fran?ois? now shows ?Mont?e St-Fran?ois? or ?St-Fran?ois Mont?e? with accents that are not in the French language. I expected Tomtom to offer better language support as they are quite strong in Europe. Sad to say but Garmin seems better in some aspects as I have a friend with a Nuvi 350 that shows those names correctly and has better Navteq maps than what TeleAtlas presently offers locally.

 

[canderson]

I could also add no user manual in French

Without getting into an argument about the value of having a monolingual society (we have enough fun with that here), I would suggest that while Canadian French isn't quite the same as France French, you will find your manual in a more appropriate language if you will select "France" for your country on the TomTom web page. The list will point you back to a multilingual list, but the first list of options is in French.

http://www.tomtom.com/support/support.php?ID=3&Language=4&Lid=2&selector=true

I don't think there's room on a CD to provide support in multiple languages, even in compressed format, and they only provide one "kit" for Canada and the U.S. at the moment. That kit covers the vast majority of that market. Remember that your TT720 holds nearly 2GB of data as delivered. A CD holds, at best, about 800MB. Much of the space is occupied by files that are language specific.

On the whole, TomTom does a pretty good job of managing language issues. They even specify two different languages if you try to select "Belgium" as your country (Belgi? vs. Belgique).

As to the quality of the mapping, I will agree. TeleAtlas could use some improvement. One can only hope that their acquisition by TomTom will have a positive impact on the timely updating of maps.

 

[Gilbert]

Without getting into an argument about the value of having a monolingual society (we have enough fun with that here), I would suggest that while Canadian French isn't quite the same as France French, you will find your manual in a more appropriate language if you will select "France" for your country on the TomTom web page. The list will point you back to a multilingual list, but the first list of options is in French.

http://www.tomtom.com/support/support.php?ID=3&Language=4&Lid=2&selector=true

Already tried that as well as all of Tomtom web sites that could have offered a French version of the manual or computer voices. You probably missed the fact I have the XL-S which is not yet available in Europe as far as I know. I meant the detailed user manual which is available in English on the web site only in English even though the tomtom gps or Home can be used in French. Even the Canadian web site does not offer the XL-S user manual in pdf format. There is a very basic installation manual that comes with the XL-S but no user manual for the operation of it that will tell where to add or remove the ?drive on the right lane? recommandation. The XL-S does not come with a CD or DVD. To tell the truth, I don't know why as they are cheap to include and even Intuit sent me their new tax program in the mail as a promotion or AOL that used to send CDs without them being requested. They could produce a DVD with all the needed files including the French computer voices and lessen the load on their servers and tech support calls. Tech support did not give me adequate instructions on getting the French computer voices. I was directed to the fantasy voices and he kept wondering about my not having the computer voices offered... I even made a second phone call to tech support with the same result. In Home the fantasy voices are offered as ?add voices? in the first screen and one needs to get to the second set of screen before the right option of ?adding computer voices? is offered. DVDs are cheap to produce and can handle 4,5GB of info and now cheaper than CDs. The XL-S only has 1GB of memory and only has the Susan computer voice as it is quite filled up. My first step was deleting the Guam map as I don't ever expect to drive there from Montreal... The space used by that map could easily have contained one small French computer voice but feel Tomtom completely ignored there are over 7,5 million people up there whose official language is French and been there for over 4 centuries.

I don't think there's room on a CD to provide support in multiple languages, even in compressed format, and they only provide one "kit" for Canada and the U.S. at the moment. That kit covers the vast majority of that market. Remember that your TT720 holds nearly 2GB of data as delivered. A CD holds, at best, about 800MB. Much of the space is occupied by files that are language specific.

On the whole, TomTom does a pretty good job of managing language issues. They even specify two different languages if you try to select "Belgium" as your country (Belgi? vs. Belgique).

As to the quality of the mapping, I will agree. TeleAtlas could use some improvement. One can only hope that their acquisition by TomTom will have a positive impact on the timely updating of maps.

Maybe they handle it better in Europe but completely ignored the language issue for Canada. As for the maps, they need to do much better very soon. They promote MapShare as being the solution to have better maps and believe this is utter bs in its present form. Until they assure our free contributions to make their maps better will be handled with a free/reduced cost for the next map, I'm out of contributing to MapShare. Making a profit out of my labour and selling it back to me for a profit is not my idea of a fair deal. As for Home, my opinion is that it is presently one of the worst written program I've encountered for a very long time. I now download the ephemeris directly without using Home and doing away with the POIs updates and street directions/names for the time being. Locally the basic map issues are much more serious than misplaced POIs or street names/directions.

 

[canderson]

You probably missed the fact I have the XL-S which is not yet available in Europe as far as I know.

Indeed I did miss that. I was wandering through the *720* section here and wasn't paying attention...

Have never had reason to look for XL-S manuals, so cannot say what languages might be available, either in terms of documentation or firmware support.

 

[Gilbert]

Indeed I did miss that. I was wandering through the *720* section here and wasn't paying attention...

Have never had reason to look for XL-S manuals, so cannot say what languages might be available, either in terms of documentation or firmware support.

When I read your post, I came to realize you had missed the fact I was using the XL-S and understand how easy to make when going thru the different forums around here. When I joined, I limited myself to the ONE forum but became aware many of the different issues are common to all models.

When I had to decide which model I would get, I did not realize the differences between models. I am not speaking of those obvious ones such as bluetooth, FM, traffic, multimedia but of the differences in maps and the implementations of text-to-speech. I now think I should have chosen the 720 as it seems to me the better choice in the line. The gps reviews and user comments on amazon etc. don't mention the details such as the non-x20s can either use internal memory or SD card meaning that when you want to choose an SD card, it needs to have double the size of internal memory to be worthwhile because you need to copy all internal memory to be able to use it.

 

[SShadow]

When I read your post, I came to realize you had missed the fact I was using the XL-S and understand how easy to make when going thru the different forums around here. When I joined, I limited myself to the ONE forum but became aware many of the different issues are common to all models.

When I had to decide which model I would get, I did not realize the differences between models. I am not speaking of those obvious ones such as bluetooth, FM, traffic, multimedia but of the differences in maps and the implementations of text-to-speech. I now think I should have chosen the 720 as it seems to me the better choice in the line. The gps reviews and user comments on amazon etc. don't mention the details such as the non-x20s can either use internal memory or SD card meaning that when you want to choose an SD card, it needs to have double the size of internal memory to be worthwhile because you need to copy all internal memory to be able to use it.

Exactly the same boat I am in. I traverse all forums on here, you never know what little nugget of information you'll find...

And I would have chosen the 720 as well, if I knew then, what I know now. It was the difference of $150... And at the time, I didn't know as much about these handy units as I do now.
Hindsight, it's 20-20. But I'm better prepared for next time - which will probably be a year or two away - barring unfortunate circumstances...

 

[canderson]

The gps reviews and user comments on amazon etc. don't mention the details such as the non-x20s can either use internal memory or SD card meaning that when you want to choose an SD card, it needs to have double the size of internal memory to be worthwhile because you need to copy all internal memory to be able to use it.

While it USED to be true that the map system had to reside on the SD card with all of the rest of the stuff, that's not true anymore with the x20 series. You can put the map set in internal memory, and the voices on the SD card, etc. As long as everything that needs to be in a particular folder is there, life is good.

I keep my NA set internal, my European set on the SD card, all of the voices over on the SD card, the 3rd party applications on the internal, and the video for one of my external applications over on the SD. The latest firmware is a whole lot more forgiving about where you put things, and seems to be able to blend internal and SD nicely. Of course, there are still things that need to stay *together* in certain folders, but the folders can get moved around quite a lot now.

When I first got my 720, I was under the same misconception due comments by owners of the prior models.

 

[Gilbert]

Exactly the same boat I am in. I traverse all forums on here, you never know what little nugget of information you'll find...

And I would have chosen the 720 as well, if I knew then, what I know now. It was the difference of $150... And at the time, I didn't know as much about these handy units as I do now.
Hindsight, it's 20-20. But I'm better prepared for next time - which will probably be a year or two away - barring unfortunate circumstances...

I'm reserving judgement for next time as I'm extremely disappointed with the local map. I've yet to get out of town as the snow has kept me inside for over a month and have had the gps for that time. I don't live in a new development, my house was built in 1924 and the area finished developing around the mid 1950's. The two missing access ramps to a main Montreal highway closest to my home has greatly impended my confidence on the routing. I don't know if it is only bad luck or just Montreal, Quebec, Eastern Provinces or Canada but until I see the corrections (already reported both to MapShare and Tele-Atlas), I'll wait to decide if it is worth keeping to Tomtom/Tele-Atlas or switch to something else. My other deceit is Home... I can't believe such a large company has such crappy software. When it loads, my cpu usage goes up like crazy for quite a while. I get the impression it loads the system content using the ancient method of PIO instead of DMA. IOW, the USB storage content seems to be transferred to memory using the cpu instead of transferring straight to memory (DMA) without cpu intervention. I'm using TaskInfo, a program that informs me of all system activities and a mine of information more complete than the MS TaskManager.

 

[SShadow]

I don't think the software can choose whether it uses PIO or DMA transfers. That's a driver setting in Windows. The software would make a call to access the harddrive to Windows, and Windows decides how to get that information, not the software.
However, that doesn't change the fact that the software has issues. It definitely does. I've not noticed the CPU utilization, but I've got a Core 2 Duo system with 2gig of ram. TTHome would have to be written VERY poorly to bring my system to its knees... In fact when I load TTHome it takes about 23% of one processor core.
Personally, I think it is a combination of the Software and perhaps sub-par hardware on the flash reader side of things. I know that I can copy things to my SD card MUCH faster on my internal card reader than I can to the XLS. So that could be causing some extra CPU cycles as well.
As for the map issues, I would be very annoyed as well. Something that has existed for 40 years should DEFINITELY be included in the map - especially in a built up area like Montreal.
In my area I haven't noticed many major issues like that. Mostly some misnamed streets. My concern mostly lies with some of the hair-brained routing decisions it makes sometimes. It makes me worry about what it's going to route me through when I am in an area that I do not know.
Like last night, it tried to route me through a zig-zag of back streets to a final left turn onto a busy 4 lane road where there were no stop lights, when if I had just kept on the original road, it would have intersected at a set of lights which would have made a left turn MUCH easier. There really wasn't any distance savings, and it would have wasted a LOT of time because it would have been almost impossible to make that left hand turn.
If I end up in a large, busy city, trying to route through things like this - it's going to be a hair-raising experience... LOL But I suppose, it would be even worse if I didn't have a GPS at all!

 

[Gilbert]

Your weird routing experiences match mine. Have you tried Google maps for the same conditions? I did and it was much better in the very few cases I've tried. Google maps uses Navtek and I had the impression Tele-Atlas was going to be slightly better. I came upon a site that had compared both maps using a database of USA addresses and Tele-Atlas was about 8% better than Navteq. That difference is not huge but leads one to think it would be at least equal for routing. I now wonder how much time will be needed for the maps to be dependable for routing?

I based my decision to acquire a gps system because even though you may have good paper maps, it can be hard to know where you are located on the map and driving at the same time. Even having the l coordinates don't help much with paper maps as they rarely have the coordinates on them. I remember driving from FL to Montreal and being on the Washington circumvent highway, stuck between semi-trailers that blocked my view, I missed my exit. Another time, driving to FL, missing an exit and ending up in downtown Philadelphia with a very small general map of the city trying to get back on course. Another time driving in heavy fog for a few hundred miles, wondering if I would end up driving past the exit because vision was so limited and being on that highway for the first time. Too often, you can't just stop to determine where you are on the paper map because you are on a highway and it can't be done. Taking an exit does not necessarily mean you can get back immediately on it as the access ramp could be quite far from where you got off. Traffic boards sometimes have many lines of text and the information you need can be hard to extract at the speed you are driving. That board may only indicate one minor waypoint to your destination. At night, street signs are not always well lighted. There are areas with lots of obstacles such as waterways, railroad tracks and highways that require careful map scrutiny to determine a route to get where you want. On a long trip, you seldom have all the needed paper maps as some stops are unexpected such as my Philadelphia stop. For long trips, I do a lot of night driving which often excludes asking for directions. I enjoy night driving because of the light traffic aspect and my night owl inclination.

 

[F22]

Routing is strange stuff. I just got a small gps puck for my Blackberry 8830 (because Verizon sees fit to disable the gps unless you pay additionally for their service).

I am trying a variety of gps programs that run on the 8830. Home from work the other day I was using Nav4All. Think about a freeway that gently curves like a series of interconnected "S's", kind of snake-like. I told this mapping program to take the shortest distance. Well, it decided to take almost every other exit from I-5 and go on local streets and then get back on the freeway only to get off at the next exit. Looking at its route - it apparently decided to straighten out each of those gentle curves and shorten the route by using local streets, then back to the freeway, then off again, to a local STRAIGHT street, then freeway. It was most enlightening in a bizarre fashion!!! I'm sure that the route was probably shorter by some slight distance but some programmer needs to think about real world issues when routing these things.

Actually, it does kind of remind me of earlier incarnations of Garmin software/maps on my 76cs. The newer maps are much better at "shorter"
and appear to know to avoid the on/off freeway situtation.

Just some observations.