Navteq Wants to Bring "Natural Guidance" to GPS Spoken Directions: Turn Right at the Hairy Spatula?

Here’s one of those ideas that seems like a really good one at first glance but may turn around and bite you.

Navteq tries to make GPS directions more ‘human’ (CNET)

The idea of Navteq’s “Natural Guidance” is to use the kind of landmarks humans use when providing directions. An example given by Navteq is “turn right after the yellow shop”. How will information like building color and business type be kept up to date? Navteq isn’t saying. But, let’s assume they will use some kind of crowd sourced technique. We’ve seen crowd sourcing used effectively in many ways. But, crowd sourcing can also be used to game systems. You can imagine gaming to do things like change “yellow store” to, for example, “hairy spatula”.

Yes, GPS speech guidance can always use some improvement. But, I don’t see anything wrong with street names and standardized distance units.

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