Voice guidance
You shouldn’t have to look at the screen to ride a route. NavForge speaks every turn — at most twice, once for a roundabout — 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
There are four points at which NavForge could speak about a turn — but you will hear at most two of them for any one turn. It works out which two are worth your attention and stays quiet for the rest.
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The long-range call — about 65 seconds out
Only on a road where that much warning is useful: it never fires closer than 800 metres and never further out than 2.5 kilometres. This is the “you’ll be leaving this road shortly” call on a highway run.
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The heads-up — about 26 seconds out
Never further out than 800 metres, never closer than 300. 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.
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The turn itself — about 13 seconds out, by default
That works out to roughly 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.
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“Continue on…” — only on a long empty stretch
When the next turn is more than 3 kilometres away, you get a reassurance that you are still on the right road rather than three minutes of silence.
A counter sits across all four calls and stops the third. Two announcements for the same turn are also kept at least 15 seconds apart, so you never get the same instruction twice in quick succession. A roundabout gets one sentence, not a running commentary — and on a small roundabout the separate “take the Nth exit” call is dropped entirely, because you are already in it by the time it would speak.
The 800-metre floor on the long-range call is sensible at 60 km/h and daft at 20 — it would be two and a half minutes of notice for a turn two sets of lights away. So above 10 km/h the outer two calls are capped at 90 and 45 seconds. Below 10 km/h the cap is ignored and the distance floor takes over, which is the right answer when you are crawling.
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.
It moves all four calls, not just the turn. The three numbers above are the turn call; the other rungs shift by the same proportion. Earlier stretches everything to about 1.3 times its normal lead, Later shrinks it to about 0.7. The “Continue on…” call works the opposite way round, as it should — asking to be told things earlier means a shorter empty stretch qualifies for one.
That call is capped at 2.5 kilometres, and at those speeds the cap arrives before the extra seconds do. It is the ceiling doing its job rather than the setting failing — the other three calls still move.
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 Detour, Rerouting around road closure
You’ll hear “four hundred metres” and “one point two kilometres” — never “400 m”. Metric distances are rounded to the nearest 50 metres up to 950, then switch to kilometres with one decimal. On imperial units it’s yards and miles the same way.
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.
Announcement timing sits directly above the voice picker, so you can set both in one visit.
The voice list is whatever your phone has installed. Tap one and it takes effect straight away — the sheet closes and the choice is remembered for next time.
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.
Thirty seconds in the driveway is a lot cheaper than finding out at the first roundabout. Audio routing on Android depends on what’s paired, what’s connected, and which app grabbed the audio last — the test button is the only way to know for certain before you’re moving.
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.
In Ride Settings there’s a Helmet intercom row that tells you where the sound is actually going: it asks for Bluetooth permission if it doesn’t have it (with a Grant button), then reads either Connected — directions go to your helmet or No intercom detected — pair your helmet in Android Bluetooth.
It reports what is true, not what has been switched on — which is worth knowing, because the row it replaced was a toggle that could read as connected with your intercom switched off.
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, and two calls about the same turn at least 15. 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. A speed camera alert waits too: it never talks over a turn instruction, but it is held and spoken in the next gap rather than lost. It is only abandoned if you get within 80 metres of the camera while it’s waiting, because by then there is no time to read the banner anyway.
- 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.
Announcements depend on a GPS fix, and a lost fix is not announced. If you haven’t heard anything for a while on an unfamiliar road, glance at the screen — a distance that has stopped counting down is the tell.