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Recalculating

There are plenty of machines today that will talk with you. The United Airlines reservations voice bot is one of the more considerate, with its solicitous "You said Washington Dulles, correct?" One fellow reports calling the new Washington Post voice bot four times asking for "Circulation" and each time the machine responded, "Marc Fisher?" Wal-Mart is offering free back-to-school wake-up calls for your kid from "Hannah Montana," which should drive a stake in the heart of that Disney franchise once and forever.

But the GPS-based navigation bots are the ones with which increasingly we are trapped. Sales are exploding, reports the Consumer Electronics Association, from some 2.3 million portable units in 2006 to a projected 18 million in 2009. Despite those episodes in the parking lot when you enter your destination and the machine observes, "You are not on a road." Thank you for sharing.

"Today, there is no excuse for the crappy voice except for companies trying to keep the cost of goods sold as low as possible," e-mails Joseph W. Dyer, the retired three-star admiral who heads the government and industrial division of iRobot, the pioneering robot manufacturer.

"Much of the aggravation, however, isn't the voice -- it is the machine's lack of context," Dyer writes. "The human understands not only where he is but where he wants to go. A simple example of this is a detour -- you know you have to take an out-of-the-way path, but the machine just keeps bitch'n -- OFF ROUTE, RECALCULATING; OFF ROUTE, RECALCULATING. . . . Even a pleasant voice gets pretty aggravating after a few seconds of that.

"An aside -- 20 years ago when we started developing the F/A-18A/B fighter, we introduced tactical aviation's first voice warning system (e.g., 'Fire! Fire!' or 'Altitude'). It was a woman's voice because a female's voice was (then) unusual in military situations. I once gave a briefing to a group of WWII aviators on the system; later, one of the gents came up to me and said, 'I was very impressed with this airplane until you told me that it nagged!' "

"The problem . . . in a nutshell, is that speech-based interfaces are not human-centric," says Victor Zue, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he focuses on making human-computer interactions more natural. "They are designed to make the machine's life easier, and not the human's. Witness the way we subject ourselves to the litany of questions from machines to get to the right department in a company, to receive weather and flight information, to look for a nearby restaurant. Who is the master and who is the slave?"

Ted Gartner acknowledges the problem. He is the spokesman for Garmin, the leading U.S. maker of portable navbots -- the ones you can put in either your car or your pocket, at an average price coming down toward $200. (In-dash units, which are also dropping in price, can still cost well over $1,000.) "There's no real easy answer for why it's done that way," Gartner says, except these things are built by engineers who care far more about packing into their devices the location of every ATM within 50 miles than whether they're driving you nuts. "I'm not sure if creating voices tops our list. It's not Job 1," Gartner says.

High-end Garmin devices now come with a choice of 50 voices, including an aspiring singer named Karen Jacobsen who guides you in Australian English. She now calls herself "The GPS Girl" and e-mails, "I've had people tell me how great 'I' have been for their relationship. Now they don't fight about directions. They can both be on the same side against me or 'the machine.' " She tells of how mortified she was when, in a friend's car in New York, she heard her machine voice render "FDR Drive" as "F-Doctor Drive."

Also available are "Raquel" in "Português Brasil," "Felix" in "Français Canadien" and "Ingrid" in "Svenska," but they all play it pretty straight. "One person's perky is another's fingernail on chalkboard. You don't want perky before your daily allotment of coffee," says Gartner.

Far more kinky are offerings for TomTom, the European leader in portable devices. Available celebrity voices include Kim Cattrall -- "Samantha" of "Sex and the City." Outside suppliers offer an X-rated "Ozzy Osbourne," which may be a clever piece of reverse psychology, getting right up in your face with the obnoxious. You, of course, must decide about driving cross-country with Mr. Mumbles.

Devices With Personality

In 2005, a collection of California visionaries working for the automobile industry saw what navbots could become. A big problem had emerged in new cars. While even the cheapest ones had more computers onboard than light bulbs, those processors didn't talk to each other. When they operated at cross-purposes, horrendous quality problems sometimes ensued, most markedly on fancy cars with the most complex technologies, as well as the highest expectations for flawless performance.

The solution was imperative, these inventors believed. They must create a device that not only integrated all the onboard intelligence from the engine to the airbags, but also communicated with the outside -- the increasingly smart roads, the smart signs, the smart traffic reports, and other smart cars automatically reporting, for example, when they've slowed in a traffic jam up ahead.