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GPS systems are great devices to give as Christmas and birthday presents. They help guide you to where you need to go, and they make re-routing traffic a breeze but consumers are fed up with GPS systems. Why, you may ask? Well, the voices on the GPS systems are usually the most boring voices on the planet, whether it be a robotic male or female voice but TomTom has does something great to help cure our boredom by adding “VoiceSkins” to the GPS systems.

So far, TomTom has captured the voices of two famous celebrities, Rap Star Snoop Dogg, and family man, Homer Simpson. By adding these VoiceSkins, the boring automated voices on your device can be replaced by the exciting and funny voices of your favorite celebs. Snoop Dogg, while recording the VoiceSkin commented, saying:

“Really it was because I’d be riding in my car and I’d be hearing that boring ass lady doing it all the time. …She’d always be turning my music down, going, “Turn left, go right, straight ahead.’ We gotta add some flavor to that.”

Although VoiceSkins are great, consumers aften forget to question how they were created. Well, here at ZiggyTek, we found it of utmost importance to explain the process to you. First, Locutio, the geniuses behind the VoiceSkins communicate with TomTom to see if they would be willing to accept a new voiceover. Once they get that settled, they would contact the seperate celebrities to come into their recording studio and record some demo sounds for them. In Snoop Dogg’s case, he approached Locutio to make his own recording. After Locutio employees analyze the demo recordings, they try and incorporate the sounds into a test run of a standard GPS system to see how well it would work and what parts to add it into to. Once they get that settled, they call back the celebrity to come and finalize the sounds, which they will build a whole new GPS structure out of, building the system from the ground up. Once they build up the voice and finalize it, they negotiate a plan to implement it into software for all TomTom systems. VoiceSkins are great for making your trip a bit more interesting, especially if you drive on roads with funny names.



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3 Comments

you’d eventually get annoyed of the voices huh :P

^ That’s what I think too. I wanna hear the Homer one.

How cool I won’t get bored hearing Alvin yap away when he gives me directions :)

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