enthusiastically annoyed

What does AI voice sound like? It's corpo-speak taken to its final form. Imagine taking the accent-less, very deliberate and very formulaic speech of a television news anchor, then chuck in some Hollywood actor-speak like you would hear in a movie preview, then make it "peppy", "upbeat" and the dreaded R-word, "relatable". Mix it all together, and that slop you hear is AI voice. Put more simply, the sound of AI voice is enthusiastically annoyed.

What's the latest to get infested this trash? Google Maps. The default voice you get now is that enthusiastically annoyed AI slop voice, complete with vocal fry to be "relatable". Because as y'know, everyone just loves vocal fry.

Shit like this is what makes people run right back to Garmin navigators. Again. It could be a Drive 53, Drive 7.1, whatever. It could even be a cheap old nuvi 54LM off eBay. Get the screen, stuff a 8GB microSD memory card in there to fit modern map data, update the maps with Garmin Express and off you go.

And yeah, I said again. Every so often, phone navigation introduces something so irritating and so annoying that a large swath of people just flat out stop using it. This time around, it's the AI slop voice.

Does Garmin get it perfect with their voices? No, of course not. The biggest complaint by most people is that they sound "computery". However, I'll take computery over enthusiastically annoyed every time. If that AI slop voice was in my navigation, that would put me off enough to where I wouldn't even use it. I absolutely do not want some peppy-yet-irritated, upbeat-yet-condescending vocal fried voice giving me navigation instructions.

I have had my battles with annoying navigation voices

On the phone, I never found a voice that worked, and this was even before AI. For nav apps with prerecorded voices, they were all too grating and/or distorted and/or spoke too fast or too slow. For TTS, the distortion at least wasn't there, but speed of speech was never quite right, and tone was either over-computery to the point of sounding robotic or too nasal. Even more so than a Garmin TTS version 1 voice from the late 2000s.

And speaking of which, I did have to modify the early TTS1 Garmin English voices Jack (US), Jill (US), Lee (AU), Karen (AU), Daniel (UK) and Emily (UK) to remove the biggest annoyance, "recalculating". Every time you missed a turn when using a TTS1 voice, "recalculating". Or even if you didn't miss a turn but instead decided to turn in to a parking lot next to the location that wasn't on the route, "recalculating", over and over. Very annoying. I used a tool someone wrote that made it possible to mod voice files, and made no-recalculating versions of the TTS1 English voices from that. Job done. I still have them. Thankfully, after a mountain of complaints by customers to Garmin, TTS2 and every version after that doesn't do the "recalculating" crap.

There are only two solutions to cure an annoying navigation voice problem

The first solution is obvious, mute the volume.

The second solution is to only use a prerecorded voice.

On a Garmin, one of the best English prerecorded voices is Australian English Matilda, which can be downloaded using Garmin Express. All that's required is connecting a Garmin screen to Express and downloading the English voice bundle. US, UK and AU English voices will all be loaded in, and Matilda will be one of them.

Prerecorded voice means no spoken street names, as in just "Turn left" instead of "Turn left on Main St". It might be basic, but that's fine because it's not annoying.

Right now I'm using the TTS voice American English-Zoe on my DriveSmart 76, but if Zoe started getting annoying, I'd switch to Matilda and wouldn't think twice about it.