Now, if you'd asked me that question a week or two ago, I wouldn't have been able to answer. Not because I didn't know the answer, but because laryngitis robbed me of the ability to speak. Some folk may have seen it as an improvement, but I found it a pain in the neck. Clear communications is a bit of a must-have thing for me, or possibly something of a mania.

Over the last week, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time with devices that have the ability to speak -- or at least pretend they do. I've been group testing GPS units, most of which trumpet large and loud their ability to give spoken directions alongside those cute little semi-animated maps, some of which feature novelty icons of cars.

What surprises me in this day and age is how bad the voices are. Thirty years ago, mechanical voices were struggling to get to the enunciation level of Daleks, and it seems as though we haven't progressed much from there.

Sure, for some devices you can download "celebrity" voices. One of the units I tested featured Darth Vader as an option. It's a cute idea, but ultimately it just doesn't work. Either the phrases are too long, and you're past the turn you should have just taken, or the joke falls flat after you've heard it once, let alone fifty times.

Leaving the celebrity fakes aside, you get a choice of "male" or "female" voices, some with choices between Aussie, UK or American accents. Except that they're like no Aussie accent you've ever heard on an actual human being, trying to give you driving instructions.
It only (generally) gets worse if they're trying to do the complex text-to-speech task of reading out actual street names, rather than just croak out "turn left".

I'm willing to allow some suspension for more complex road names (especially those of Aboriginal origin), but on one stretch of driving in my test area, more than one GPS pronounced I was driving on, in sequence, "Grebe Lear" "Gall Stone" and "Giorgii" streets. Which might have been fine if I found myself for some reason driving through a psychedelic Shakespeare-influenced Russian medical ward. When the streets in question were in fact "Grevillea" "Galston" and "George" street, however, we've got a problem.

Ideally, GPS spoken instructions should be short -- so you've got time to process them -- and unequivocally clear about what it is you need to do, in case traffic conditions mean it's not practical to look at the map screen in enough time. So far, to put it bluntly, they're not.