TomTom VIA 120 EUROPE Voice Recognition Issues

[vvv1vvv]

I recently bought a TomTom VIA 120 Europe while I was in France with the intention of using it in Ireland (and English as language). In the shop, I was told the unit will work just fine in English. Once out of the shop I gave it a try and once I set the language to English it worked fine giving me directions in English. I did not test voice commands at all, assuming they would be language independent with the exception of street numbers maybe. Back in Ireland, I tried the voice commands and it doesn?t work in English at all; the little French I have yields far better results.

Did I miss some settings or is this normal? The language is set to English, but voice recognition requires French, since the unit was purchased in France? If this is the case, is there a way to update the software to rectify this problem?

 

[dhn]

Think this is a big problem coming to light where people buying the model in country A are not able to use it in country B. Some are finding that even the voice from the unit is in country A's language.

That said, try resetting your unit by holding the power button about 10 seconds till the drum sounds. If that doesn't solve the issue, try restoring to factory defaults. You'll lose all custom settings but it may help.

Finally, you DO have Eng_UK selected as your language, right?

 

[vvv1vvv]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I tried to reset the unit as advised and no joy. Language is set to Eng_UK as well. Voice directions from the unit work just fine in English. It's when i try to give voice commands in English, the unit does not recognise English. Being able to give vocal commands instead of typing was a strong buying point in my case.

 

[dhn]

See here:
TomTom Start 20 - bought in Europe - no English TT... - TomTom Discussions

and

English voices on German-bought TT GO Live 1000 - TomTom Discussions

and

VIA 120 Live - default voice language change - TomTom Discussions

 

[vvv1vvv]

kind of sorted

Thanks for the links.

For others that might encounter the same issue:
I have been in contact with customer support in UK and I was told I need to update text to speech (TTS) files to English. This is available at http://www.tomtom.com/voices (link is dead at the moment but it will be available later today according to customer support)

 

[canderson]

Thanks for the links.

For others that might encounter the same issue:
I have been in contact with customer support in UK and I was told I need to update text to speech (TTS) files to English. This is available at http://www.tomtom.com/voices (link is dead at the moment but it will be available later today according to customer support)

Somehow I suspect Tech Support has given you some bad information. Your problem, as I understand it, is not with text-to-speech, which seems to be working correctly, but with the reverse ... speech-to-text, so to speak. The files used to create spoken directions (TTS) are not the same files that are used to interpret spoken commands. You might want to call them again and see if you can get a better answer.

 

[Andy_P]

TTS and voice command ARE linked in some strange way though....
In order to use Voice Command, you need to have a TTS voice selected.

....but I've never understood why!

 

[vvv1vvv]

Canderson, what you said makes perfect sense and I challenged tech support on that at the time. The rep however, insisted these are the files I need. Furthermore, what difference does it make if I say ?London? with a British or French accent? I guess it depends on how the voice recognition algorithm is built.

 

[canderson]

I'm just parsing the original part of this thread - and I have to tell you - I'm seriously confused now.

The Via120 uses MyTomTom instead of TomTom Home. As such, the unit cannot be seen as an external drive device from your PC, and all transactions must occur through MyTomTom. That would not leave you in a position to replace specific files to begin with. The link they pointed you to isn't the right one for voices (I'm pretty sure they were trying to direct you to TomTom, portable GPS car navigation systems) - and it wouldn't do you any good, either. AFAIK, there is still no version of MyTomTom that's ready for custom voices (yet). More to the point, the voices on the page referenced ARE only to create speech, not interpret it.

Either I'm completely missing something here, or there's a whole lot of confusion on Tech Support's end about the nature of the Via120 product as we know it here.

 

[Andy_P]

AFAIK, there is still no version of MyTomTom that's ready for custom voices (yet).

There is now, but only in the UK and Europe so far, and it's not going to help in this case.

The latest My TomTom allows you to add "community" voices i.e. recorded ones) but not the TTS voices OR the CSpeech files he actually needs!

And none of this goes anywhere towards explaining how the Customer Services rep can have got their advice so badly wrong!
They need to turn their crib sheet over to the side that says "Devices that use MyTomTom rather than Home - be polite but there's nothing they can do!"