Garmin Nuvi 880 and 850 Auto GPS Satellite Navigation Devices

The Garmin Nuvi 880 and 850 share most features of the Garmin 770 and 780 Auto GPS navigators apart, notably, from Speech Recognition capability.

Lesser differences in specifications include:

Larger Screen of 4.9″W x 3.1″H x .7″D (12.4 x 7.8 x 1.77 cm)
Removable Battery
Up to 4 hours battery life as opposed to 5
MicroSD card (not included) vs SD card
Internal dual speakers as opposed to single speaker
Remote control

The sole difference between the Garmin Nuvi 880 and Garmin Nuvi 850 is the lack of Bluetooth wireless technology for hands-free calling with the 850.

Speech Recognition – Garmin Nuvi 880 and 850

Vocal instructions are picked up by a push-to-talk wireless remote mounted on the steering wheel. Conveniently, the voice recognition does not require any initial training to improve accuracy. Voice navigation can be achieved in a number of ways including; reading touchscreen display text, Points of Interest (POI), command keywords, brand names and spoken addresses. Speech recognition is available for American English, British English, European French, European Spanish, German, Italian, and Netherlands Dutch languages. To see how Garmin’s speech recognition works in reality have a look at the demonstration video by Garmin.

While Garmin’s speech recognition is a useful tool it requires the use of a structured voice instructions and cannot cope with conversational enquiries as can Pioneer’s recently announced AVIC-F500BT. The Pioneer AVIC-500BT is a hybrid auto navigation device which will fit in the dash and can be removed to become a personal navigation device away from the car. The AVIC-500BT uses VoiceBox’s Conversational Voice Search Platform. A detailed review of this speech recognition software is included in our review of the AVIC-500BT.