Garmin Nuvi 880 and 850 Auto GPS Satellite Navigation Devices

February 19, 2008

Garmin Nuvi 880 and 850 Auto GPS Satellite Navigation Devices

The Garmin Nuvi 880 and 850 share all features of the Garmin 770 and 780 Auto GPS navigators. The primary difference is the inclusion of Speech recognition allowing navigation using voice commands.

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

Speech pickup for the Garmin 880 and 850 is from a push-to-talk wireless remote mounted on the steering wheel. Using a vocabulary matching the buttons on the touchscreen display users can navigate the menus by spoken commands. Conveniently, the voice recognition does not require any initial training to improve accuracy.

As well as navigating commands, speech recognition allows users to search for Points of Interest (POI). The word “find” followed by the keyword required is used to command a search. Brand names are recognized as well as place names. Of course speech recognition can also be used to search for addresses as well.

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.