Forum: General Topics

When a route is viewed on the Route Page [3], along with the instructions graphical direction arrows are shown. It appears that these graphics are in the TMJ installation files, not produced from the online server, and are tagged to information in the route file.
Would it be technically possible to associate a set of voice/sound files to the turn directions? Ideally the sound files( wav, amr, mp3 etc ) would be placed on or loaded from the SD card and thus could be modified to suit the user.

Hi Tom,

Actually the arrow graphics are generated on-the-fly so that they scale for different screen sizes, but yes, some basic turn information is embedded in the routing data.

I have done some testing of voice instructions (in fact my 'test' build has had this functionality for a couple of years), which works exactly as you suggest with a set of mp3 files stored on the memory card. However I've held back on releasing it since it never quite seems to be good enough at describing the route accurately, and I'm a little reluctant to promote TMJ as a full sat-nav device where, frankly, a TomTom etc is better suited to this.

The problems are partly due to the simplifications I've made in the voice commands, eg there are a small set of recordings for turns dependant on their angle - 'Straight Ahead', 'Slight Left', 'Turn Left', 'Sharp Left', etc, along with a set of numbers for reading out distances to the next turn. This copes with maybe 80% of situations, but there always seems to be a roundabout or weird junction that then confuses it.

On roundabouts, for example, it'll always say 'turn left' (in the UK at least), since it sees the entry onto the roundabout as one junction, with another 'turn left' to exit the roundabout (the roundabout itself just being in effect a tightly curved road). While this specific case is something I can probably improve, it is just one of a number of situations that I'd need to look at, which could become pretty complex, but I'll see how things go in future releases...

Cheers,
Stephen