Build 30: the map, the routes, the search and the voice are ours

Since build 18 the app has stopped renting most of what it runs on.

The map you look at, the routes you drive, the places you search for and the voice that reads the directions are all now made on one machine in Beauharnois, Québec. That was the whole point of starting this, and until this week it was a plan rather than a thing.

It is also the largest change the beta has had, which is another way of saying it is the one most likely to have broken something. If a thing that worked last week does not work today, that is worth an email more than almost anything else you could send.

New: the map is ours

Drawn from OpenStreetMap, built on our own machine, in cartography of our own rather than a provider's default. Day and night. Highway shields instead of bare numbers, drawn icons instead of coloured dots, and labels that thin out when a city is crowded and fill back in when it is not.

One thing worth naming, because a tester found it and it was worse than she knew. Barb, in the West Kootenay, wrote to say that no towns were labelled anywhere near her — a traveller passing through would think there was nothing along the highways. She was right, and it was not the Kootenays: the rule deciding which place names to draw used an importance number set on a world scale, so Canadian towns scored too low to be drawn at any zoom you would ever use. Counting labels on single tiles, Toronto got one, Cape Breton got one, rural Saskatchewan got none. Castlegar, Trail, Rossland and Fruitvale are all on the map now, and so is most of the country.

Satellite is still TomTom's imagery. There is no open Canadian equivalent at that resolution, so choosing satellite means choosing them until that changes.

New: the routes are ours

Routes are calculated on our machine now, using OpenStreetMap roads, and two things came with that.

Road closures. The provinces publish them and we read them: Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, Québec and Newfoundland and Labrador so far, with six more waiting on a key. A road that is fully closed is a road the route will not use. Closures are refreshed every five minutes, and a route never waits on a feed being slow.

Four cities now come in alongside them — Edmonton, St. Albert, Ottawa and Vancouver — and they roughly quadrupled what we know about. The provinces gave the whole country 68 shut roads; those four cities add about 165 more, and they are on the streets you actually turn onto rather than the highways between towns.

That gap was not academic. Driving out of Sturgeon County I was sent down a stretch of Ray Gibbon Drive in St. Albert that has been closed since July. Alberta 511 was right not to mention it — Ray Gibbon Drive is a municipal road and the provincial feeds carry provincial ones — and St. Albert had published it the whole time, in a map layer that is not even listed in the city's own open-data catalogue. Ottawa and Vancouver hand over the shut stretch of road itself rather than a pin in the middle of it, which is better data than most provinces give us.

Closures are now checked against the route you were given, not the line between its ends. Which shut roads a route is told about used to be decided by drawing a straight line from where you are to where you are going and taking whatever lay nearest it. The line from my house to West Edmonton Mall passes three kilometres from that Ray Gibbon closure, so it ranked tenth of seventy-nine and was dropped — while the road network says you cannot leave that part of the county any other way. The router now works out a route, asks what that route actually drives down, and goes round it.

Two ways to go, more often than not. The second route is found by blocking a stretch of the first one and asking again. There was only ever one place it tried, and when there was no junction near that spot the answer came back either absurdly long or down the same road — so the trip offered one choice. It now tries three places along the route and takes the first that gives you a genuinely different road. Measured across twelve cities, ten of twelve trips now offer two.

Traffic on the right roads. Live traffic still comes from TomTom, because knowing how fast traffic is moving means watching a great many vehicles and the only way to do that ourselves would be to watch you. But it is now matched onto our own roads before it is drawn, so a jam appears on the road it is actually on rather than beside it. Closed stretches are drawn red with white hatching, so the one thing you cannot drive through stops looking like the thing you can drive through slowly.

The app also tells you how much of the drive is the queue — "+8 min" beside the route, and a badge while you are driving if it is more than five minutes. It knew all along and was reporting zero: the number had been hardcoded before there was any traffic to report, and the zero outlived the reason for it.

New: search is ours

Ten and a half million Canadian places, from the same map data, on the same machine. It answers the nearest one first, calls shops by their own names, and no longer lists the same shop twice because somebody mapped it as both an outline and a point.

Two searches from one tester's morning show what changed. Searching for No Frills used to return three rows named after the franchisees — "Alan & Mic…", "Jeff & Ta…" — with the words "No Frills" nowhere on screen. Searching for the Bulk Barn she was parked outside in North Bay returned the one in Owen Sound, 226 km away, first. Both now answer with the shop she meant.

Charging stations come from the federal register rather than a provider's list, and can be searched along the route instead of near you — a charger eighty kilometres ahead is more use than one four kilometres behind.

It still falls back to the old provider when our index cannot answer, which today is mostly rural house numbers. OpenStreetMap's Canadian address coverage is good in cities and thin outside them, and that will take a while to change.

New: a voice of our own

Two voices, Annie and Emma, made on our machine and downloaded with the route rather than read aloud by the phone. Annie is what a new install speaks with.

They are recordings of the exact sentences your route will use, fetched while you are still looking at the overview deciding whether to start. A whole route's worth is about three hundred kilobytes — a fraction of the map tiles for the same drive. With no signal, or before the recordings arrive, the phone's own voice reads the prompt, which is what happened before any of this existed.

French still uses the phone's voice. The two we make are English recordings and cannot read French.

They are loud enough now, and they are not choppy. Driving with them, the first thing I noticed was that our voice was barely audible while the phone's own voice was fine — measured afterwards, ours was about nine decibels quieter, which is most of the way to half as loud. The recordings are now levelled so each one peaks at the same place. The second thing was that they sounded like a phone call with a bad connection, and that was the encoder: at the bitrate we were using it was quietly resampling 24 kHz down to 22.05 kHz and cutting the top off everything. Both voices are re-made at twice the bitrate.

And there is a volume control, in Settings under Voice: full, medium or quiet. It sets the level of our voices and the phone's alike, so turning the directions down no longer means turning the radio up.

The voice list in Settings is also shorter. Your phone will admit to about forty voices, most of them novelty items and relics of speech engines from the nineteen-nineties. It is now ours, then your phone's own voice, then Samantha, Daniel, Karen and Moira.

New: a word before you pull away

Leaving a driveway, the app used to say nothing until the first turn was close — and if the first turn was close to home, nothing at all. Sheila wrote to say it never told her whether to turn left or right leaving her own house, which was exactly right: the first prompt fires at a distance that is already behind you when you set off. It now says which way to go as you pull away.

Fixed: four things from one drive

A single evening's driving turned up four, which is the argument for testing in a car rather than at a desk.

• Two voices at once. Starting navigation read the first direction in the phone's voice and in Annie simultaneously, over each other. An urgent prompt was resetting the "is something speaking" flag without stopping what was already speaking.
• The first direction waits for the right voice. Pressing Start quickly after the routes appeared beat the first recording down the wire, so the drive opened in the phone's voice. It now waits up to ten seconds for ours before falling back — long enough to win on any normal connection, short enough that you are not driving in silence.
• The opening line is about where you are. Ending a route halfway and starting it again replayed the departure instruction from where the car had been when the route was worked out, which by then was kilometres behind. It is not said at all if you are more than 250 m from where the route begins.
• Rerouting is less stubborn. Driving deliberately away from the route could produce five or more attempts to put you back on the road you had just refused. It now offers the rejoining route once; refuse it and you get the fastest way from where you actually are.

Changed: two prompts a turn, timed by how fast you are going

It used to be two fixed distances whatever the road, which meant a motorway exit got the same warning as a turn onto a village street. Geoff pointed out that a prompt at a hundred metres is no use at a hundred kilometres an hour, and that two prompts is about the most anyone wants.

So: one far enough out to decide something — which lane, whether to move over — and one at the junction to act on. The distances come from the speed of the road rather than from a table: about seven hundred metres on a motorway, about a hundred and fifty in a village.

Fixed, from your emails

• Numbered streets are ordinals. "52nd Street", not "fifty two street", which is most of what a driver hears in a grid city.
• Parkway. "Pky" was read as "peeky" by one tester's phone and as "P K Y" by another's, on the same day. So were Terr, Sdrd, Conc, Lndg, Hbr, and the Mt that starts Mt Newton Crossroad.
• A compass letter at the end of a road name. "16 Ave N." expanded the road type and left the direction as a letter. All four now behave the same way, in both languages.
• "11/Algonquin Avenue" was printed, and read out, with the slash in it.
• French directions are in French. The app had been asking correctly and the router had been answering in English, so the French voice read English instructions with a French accent. It was also saying "sud-est" where it meant "sud-ouest" — ninety degrees wrong, on the first thing you hear.
• Avoid toll roads changes the route you are looking at. Turning it on after asking for directions did nothing at all, which reads as the setting being ignored, and it was. Chris caught this on a Guelph-to-Pearson route that used the 407 and was slower than the 401.
• A reroute no longer takes you back to the road you refused. Leaving a route deliberately could produce a loop with a turnaround in it, to rejoin the line you had just rejected. Brad's drive to Sidney was fourteen kilometres and twenty minutes for a ten-minute trip.
• The turn distance keeps up. It said thirty-five metres while Patty was sitting at the corner. The distance is now projected from the age of the GPS fix rather than from an assumed second.
• "You have arrived" is not said for the last 2.8 km. On a route with no turn near the end, the arrival line was shown for the whole approach.
• The first prompt is in the voice you chose. Pressing Start straight after the route appeared could beat the first recording down the wire, so the first direction came out in the phone's voice and the rest in Annie.
• Tap one of the greyed routes to choose it. A greyed line is the clearest statement of what an alternative is, and pointing at it did nothing.
• Tap a place on the map and it opens. The place you pick grows and keeps its name where it was, instead of getting a pin dropped on top of it.
• Search stays where you are while you type. Half a word matches things all over the country, and one match in Quebec used to take the whole map with it: typing "ecole" in Edmonton flew out to fit schools in Montréal and came back when the word was finished.
• One address, one answer. Searching an address that matched several near-identical records left the extras on the map.
• Speed limits arrive with the route rather than being asked for every fifteen seconds.
• Chargers that were duplicates are folded together, and only those.

Known gaps

CarPlay is built and waiting on Apple's approval, which is not something I can hurry. Android Auto's car screen is the next big piece. Landscape and multi-stop routes are on the list. Six provinces have no closure feed yet, and only four cities do. Tapping a closure on the map still tells you nothing about it, which it should.

Two I found while measuring this build, both worth naming because you might meet them. Routes longer than about two hundred kilometres come back with no speed limits at all — the step that reads them gives up on a shape that long, silently, and always has. And on a trip that runs into three or more closures at once in a dense downtown, going round all of them can leave no way through, in which case you are given the route anyway rather than a blank screen: it is the honest answer, but it means a closed road can still appear on a route in the middle of a city.