IBM (NYSE:IBM) announced this past week that it has been working with Honda Motor Company (NYSE:HMC) on a new real-time car navigation system.  The jointly developed system provides hands-free functionality and uses speech recognition and syntehsis (TTS or text-to-speech) to be able to identify street and city names that exist across the entire continental United States (this is a big vocabulary system, that contains 1.7 million street and city names and about 700 spoken commands).  Once the intended destination is spoken by the driver, the TTS engine will provide turn-by-turn voice guidance on how to get to that address.  The TTS engine provides a very natural voice (not synthetic or robotic, like most TTS engines from the past).  IBM and Honda were able to leverage hours of speech recordings from previous Honda systems.

Another value-add is nationawide dining information, which enables the drviers to request names and directions to restaurants.  The system is targeted to be standard equipment on the 2005 Acura RL model and also available as an option on the 2005 Acura MDX and 2005 Honda Odyssey in the U.S. and Canada.