Voice guidance

You shouldn’t have to look at the screen to ride a route. NavForge speaks every turn, twice for the important ones, and routes the sound through a helmet intercom if you have one paired. Here’s when it talks, what it says, and the handful of reasons you might hear nothing at all.

When you’ll hear a turn

Each turn gets up to two announcements.

1. The early heads-up

   Roughly 26 seconds of riding before the turn — never further out than 800 metres, never closer than 300. This is the “start thinking about your lane” call. It only fires if the routing data supplied an early-warning phrase for that turn, so you won’t get one everywhere.

2. The turn itself

   Around 13 seconds before you get there by default. That works out to about 150 metres at suburban speed and 400 metres on a fast road — with a floor of 150 metres so a slow crawl still gets a warning, and a ceiling of 400 metres, lifted to 800 once you’re doing 100 km/h or more.

There’s a third case. If two turns fall within 80 metres of each other, they’re spoken as one sentence rather than two — the second instruction gets tacked on as “… Then in 50 metres, …” so you hear both before you commit to the first. If both turns end with the same road name, the name is dropped from the second half instead of being repeated.

And when you first tap Go, the app speaks your first real instruction straight away, before you’ve moved — so you know which way to point the bike.

Changing the timing

Menu → Ride Settings → the Turn-by-turn section → Announcement timing. Three choices:

• Earlier — 17 seconds of lead time. More warning at speed.
• Normal — 13 seconds. The recommended setting.
• Later — 9 seconds. A tighter window, closer to the junction.

The setting is a time, not a distance, so it scales with how fast you’re going. The screen describes it as Earlier = more lead time at speed. Normal = 13 s (recommended). Later = shorter window.

What the app actually says

Most turn wording comes from the routing engine, so it varies with the road and the manoeuvre — “Turn right onto Bells Line of Road”, “Enter the roundabout and take the 2nd exit”, and so on. What NavForge controls is the wrapper around it, and those lines are fixed:

• Distance-prefixed instructions come out as “In 400 metres, …” then the turn.
• Approaching the end of the route you get In 400 metres, your destination is ahead.
• On arrival, You have arrived at your destination.
• When you leave the route, Rerouting.
• When you get back on it, Back on your route.
• After tapping Road blocked, Rerouting around road closure

Picking a voice

Menu → Ride Settings → Navigation voice. Tapping it opens a sheet listing every text-to-speech voice installed on your phone, sorted by language, with a count at the top like 6 of 128 voices and a Search language… box to cut the list down.

Names are shown in plain language — “English (Australia)”, “German”, “Japanese” — with a number appended when your phone has several voices for the same language. Tap one and it applies immediately and is remembered; you don’t need to restart anything. Until you’ve picked one, the tile reads System default and the app uses your phone’s own navigation voice.

Voices themselves come from Android, not from NavForge. If the language you want isn’t in the list, install it through your phone’s text-to-speech settings and it will appear next time you open the sheet.

Testing it before you ride

Underneath the voice picker there’s Test voice, described on screen as Speak a short test utterance — check you can hear it on your helmet / car. Tap it with your helmet on and your intercom connected. It speaks a short confirmation line, and if the engine was too busy to take the request you’ll get a Test voice dropped — TTS may be busy. Try again. message.

Helmet intercoms

Navigation audio is tagged as guidance, which means Android sends it to your paired Bluetooth headset and ducks any music playing rather than stopping it. That works out of the box for most A2DP headsets, and it keeps working with the screen off.

For intercoms that use the hands-free profile — Sena, Cardo, FreedConn and similar — there’s a switch in Ride Settings called Helmet Intercom (HFP). Turning it on asks for Bluetooth permission; once granted the subtitle reads HFP active — TTS routes to Sena, Cardo, FreedConn. If you decline, the app falls back to normal Bluetooth audio and tells you so.

To turn it off again you revoke the Bluetooth permission in Android’s settings — the switch says as much when you tap it.

Why you might hear nothing

In rough order of likelihood:

• Media volume is at zero. Navigation speech rides on the media stream, not the ringer. The first time the app tries to speak on a ride it checks, and if the media volume is zero you get a one-off on-screen message: Media volume is 0 — nav voice will be silent. Turn up media volume. It only appears once per ride, so if you dismissed it without reading it, that’s the one.
• Something else was mid-sentence. Announcements are spaced at least 2.5 seconds apart. If a turn call lands while the engine is still speaking, it’s skipped for that moment and retried a second later — you’ll usually still get it. Speed camera alerts don’t retry: if a turn instruction is being spoken at that instant, that camera alert is dropped.
• You’ve just been told the same thing. An identical instruction won’t be repeated within 30 seconds.
• You’re off-route. While the app is guiding you back onto the route, turn announcements are deliberately quiet — you get Rerouting., then one instruction for the way back, and then nothing until you’re either back on the route or it has given up and recalculated. That silence is intentional, not a fault.
• Your headset dropped the connection. Android may keep reporting the route as fine while the link is gone. The Test voice button is the quickest check.