On my old Garmin navigation device, there were about 10 different voice accents you could choose. My wife just loved the Australian. I could not find anything on the Jaguar beyond male versus female. Does anyone know of this type of configuration is buried somewhere? Thanks.

 

I don't think you can choose accents - you'd think they would at least give us an English accent! I know my kids loved the voice on an old Tom Tom - she even used regional wording like "motorway" . On an A8 I had, the voice always sounded angry - like she wanted to add "damn it" to the end of anything she said... I think there was another thread that addressed this topic with a response from Jaguar stating that the regional languages were deleted because the system would then also be listening for those accents when using voice command (which actually makes no sense whatosever, because the response should be able to be independent of the input - for example, there's no reason that the system shouldn't be able to listen to a US accent and even respond in a completely different language).

 

I can't speak about the 2012's, but on my 2011 you had a choice of 15 or 20 languages, all in female voice. I switched mine from US English to British English and everyone loves the way "she" sounds.

 

Found it. Setup->system->language gives you a number of choices including UK English, but not Australian English.

 

I stand corrected, though I was referring to what was told to a member by Jaguar. It seems there was a running model year change. My XF does have the UK English choice and I have switched to her soothing voice. The car seems so much more sophisticated now...

Below, I pasted the response about the lack of language choice in someone's 2012 XF that was built in March of 2012:

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A similar campaign to delete these languages had been planned for early 12MY XF but for a while variety of reasons was withdrawn.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