I have a Garmin Nuvi 1490T sat nav. We spend a lot of time together in the car, I love everything about it, expect for one thing: the voiced instructions. Now don’t get me wrong, I prefer to hear the instructions rather than having to look at the sat nav screen. What I don’t like is the actual voice.

In the beginning it was OK. It was a new sat nav and the voice was a novelty. The more time I spent in the car having to listen to the same dull, repetitive, voice the more it drove me crazy!

Over a coffee, I was venting my frustration with one of my geeky friends. You know the type, you hand them a gadget or some new piece of technology and they seem to instantly understand it. Anyway, he told me that the it’s easy to change the voice.

Apparently, there are many websites offering celebrity sat nav voices for people just like me that are fed up with the regular voice.

To install the new voice is pretty simple: just find a website that has the voice you want; download the files to your computer; attach the sat nav to the computer; copy the files over to the sat nav and finally select the new voice in the options screen. If that doesn’t sound so simple, I agree. Which is why I had my friend go ahead and do it for me.

If everything went well then, you should hear the new voice. If not, you may need to find a friend to help you out and find out what went wrong.

Luckily, my Nuvi 1490 is capable of changing the voice. It seems that not all sat nav manufacturers allow this to be done. For instance, with my previous budget sat nav the Binatone G350, I would have been stuck with the default voice. I guess you get what you pay for!