Your TomTom speaks Basque

Some friends in this community (Eibar.org) that hosts the English Cemetery gathered to make TomTom car navigation systems talk in Basque. The recording session (using an Ikea sofa as isolation) took place in our office, and all was volunteer. The four voices were then processed, and here they are. 3 men, 1 woman. 2 talk in standard Basque, 2 in the local dialect.

If you want to hear it, you won't hurt your TomTom, you can switch to Basque from your language just for a try, and then return to your mother tongue or something else than you can understand. There are 4 zipped files you can download from the Deskargatu links in this page. Unzip and you'll find a triplet of files with these extensions: .chk, .bmp eta .vif. Connect your TomTom to your computer using the USB link, and place those 3 files to the voices folder of your TomTom. Disconnect from the computer, switch on the navigator, and change voice to the Basque speaker. It also works in mobile devices (phones, PDAs) that have a GPS and run on Windows Mobile with the TomTom software add-on (see a video of a demo in a PDA).

The images are of the speakers themselves. I think the most distinctly and ethnically Basque head is the one pertaining to Mikel Iturria a.k.a. Iturri, a fellow bilingual blogger (Basque / Spanish).

However, if you're going to use the TomTom to drive thru the Basque Country, be aware and don't confide too much on Google Maps for route planning, or for your GPS car-navigation system to guide you correctly: one mayor highway crossing the Basque Country, the AP-1, is shown as complete and used for traffic calculation by Teleatlas (company bought by TomTom recently), but half the road is not finished yet.

I've heard a car GPS guiding us towards a non-existant road near Arrasate, for instance. Look at the whole route in Google Maps, and take in mind that south of Arrasate, all this piece of road (bigger map) is not built. Not in 2008, sure. Teleatlas competitor Navteq, by the way, has the road right, as can be seen in Yahoo Maps (which uses Navteq cartography).

So... it's also time to promote OpenStreetMap again! My friend Gari Araolaza, proud mapper of my hometown, will give the 1st ever OSM seminar in Basque next july, with real street mapping included.