Because I have always liked the British accented female voice in my previous Jags, I tried to select it for the nav system and voice command system in my new 2012 XF that was built in March. I discovered there was no UK English selection in the language menu and I contacted my sales person at the dealership to see if he knew why it was missing. After his research, he received the email below from a Mr. Clark at Mahwah.

Frankly, If the command system using the UK English voice, which I think is BBC English (RP English), can interpret all of the various accents used in the UK, some of which are almost unintelligible, then it should be able to cope with a fair number of words of USA English after it is trained - that is if the training works well.

Subject: Language change
John,
I have copied the response to your question below.

Yes there has been a change to remove UK English, European French and European Spanish from the list of available language options. Same occurred on XJ but with production back in December when the touch screen changed to the 6 Row design. That campaign K121 we had been running on XJ to change early 12My cars from 7 row touch screen to 6 row also had the same effect on removing those same languages.

A similar campaign to delete these languages had been planned for early 12MY XF but for a while variety of reasons was withdrawn.

At the launch of 12MY we did issue new information with the PDI to stipulate that cars should always have the North American versions of English/French/Spanish selected when conducting the PDI preparing a car for delivery.

The reason this is all done relates to the voice activation.

The system can only handle a few languages through all its operations and is therefore set up to favor those languages appropriate to the market where it is sold. If you set UK English the system is not only responding in that language but it is also listening in UK English. When it does not receive inputs in UK English it can't interpret the phonetics accurately and for much of the time it will fail and give an error message or the incorrect response.

So the Euro languages were deleted to improve the performance of voice activation to provide more reliable series of responses to driver inputs.

Hope that helps

Alan Clarke
Manager, Product Investigation

 

Voice recognition software is very tricky. The more complicated the sentence the more computing power you must have. My Dragon Dictation screws up if I have head cold or even a glass of wine for lunch. Single word commands are less challenging. Accents are pretty much impossible for anything but the simplest recognition problems. To maximize accuracy it is essential to Pre program for accents. If you ever try the Dragon software on the iPhone try not to be too impressed. The iPhone sends the file to a server farm which rapidly crunches the data and sends it right back to you, the phone isn't smart enough. It is impressive but not as impressive as Apple and Nuance make it seem.

 

Yes, I understand that it can be tricky. But if it is too difficult, it would be nice if an alternate language selection was available that understood USA English commands, but replied with compatible British-accented USA words. That shouldn't be too difficult to accomplish. It would also enhance the cachet of the car in North America. My wife and I as well as our passengers always liked the British-accented instructions from the Nav systems in all of our previous Jags. It seemed more suited to the car.

 

You would think that US vocabulary and an English voice would be easy but apparently not for Jaguar. Given that the voice is synthesized from preset phrases electronically, it would be easy enough to do as the voice recognition and voice output are not related. Prompts in English, voice recognition in US English would not be that difficult.

The removal of UK English (an odd phrase, since, in my case I was born in England and am therefore English and, by definition speak English, so why the qualifier. Surely it should be US English and English?) from the 2012 models is a killer for me. Now I cannot possibly buy a 2012 or later XF :-) Mini manage to make it work for the US market, so why not Jaguar. Sounds like an excuse to me and is a limitation of the software they use. Given that the unit appears to be made by Denso, which are Japanese and were (maybe still are) a division of Toyota it would seem to be a problem with the supplier.

 

I agree. In this case, Marketing should have overruled R&D to make the car at least respond in a UK English accent. I totally understand why the voice recognition has to be different, but the reply need not be tied to that.

 

Sorry to hear about this. It wouldn't have kept me from ordering one (delivery in July), but I use both the Jaguar and a Garmin GPS on trips, and the UK voice makes it easy to distinguish which one is talking to me. It will be a disappointment, especially since I don't plan to use the voice activation.

 

Odd isn't it since my message center will tell me (by displayed text) that it is the boot which is open. No idea what the car is trying to tell me though..... 8-)