[bartman32]

When are they going to do a text to speech upgrade so it will say the name of the street rather than "turn left in 100 feet on the next road".

[ksfrogman]

They probably can, but then it would sound like the Canadian "Talking Moose" voice that we get with the Bluetooth voice synthesizer.

[BMWDavid]

Personally I think it sounds like the voice from the Speak and Spell toy, but you can use the arrow display function to display the current street you are driving on and the next street you will turn onto.

[bartman32]

This is becoming more and more a regular feature in the GPS market. ie Tom Tom, Navigon, etc will all have this on their next version of GPS.

[BK]

I'm not that enthralled with this feature on GPS units and don't miss it on the Bimmer. On the other hand, the fact that our nav does not say whether the destination is on the right or left side of the street is unforgivable.

[Babe]

TTS technology today is relatively cheap. It lies on one chip. BMW is about 3-4 years behind technology speaking. They wait till it’s dirt cheap to add a feature.

PS. My brother is a products engineer consultant in electronic, and he did a project study for a major GPS company. Also the older the map data is, the cheaper it is. They rated some of the car manufacture’s Navi systems and BMW was the last on the list next to Mazda and Ford...

Sorry, but my free Motorola phone has a better navi than BMW, it has TTS and tells you what side of the street your destination is on.

The best was Acura/Honda’s navi…

THE SEARCH OF POI's in BMW's navi is mundane, and horrible. You have to know the category of what you are looking for, before you can search it.

[snappa]

Well I have to say that I'm disappointed with this missing feature of the nav. My highlander nav has text to speech and tells you the name of the street you're turning on as well as the route names of highways, north, south, etc.

This is a basic navigation feature I expected to be there. I just picked up my car and am impressed with it. The nav will work well for me but I guess i just am a bit surprised at this missing feature.

[TurboFan]

Originally Posted by bartman32

When are they going to do a text to speech upgrade so it will say the name of the street rather than "turn left in 100 feet on the next road".

Garmin, Alpine, Kenwood all have this available. Who knows when it'll hit the OEM market.

[snappa]

Funny thing is I was talking to the dealer when we were doing the acceptance drive. He was showing me as much as he could while I was driving. He pointed out all these cool features like traffic control, the iPod integration, blue tooth, etc. He was telling me that he was getting a portable nav since he travels. I said "just make sure it does text to speech". He asked why and I explained.

I completely took for granted that the car nav would have that as BMW integrated nav was the first one I experienced back in 99 on a 540. You would figure they would have kept up with the technology as Europe is usually early adopters of technology like this.

On the plus front, the blue tooth integration with my iPhone is phenomenal. The iPod adapter works very well.

Would knowing there was no text to speech feature on the nav prevented me from ordering it? Maybe but with all things considered I still like the integrated nav and it will more than do the job. Who knows, maybe this is a software upgrade BMW can do. NONE of the current BMW nav systems have this (dealer's claim) but rumor is that this will be available on the 1 series so you know it is coming.