In love with the voice on the GPS

BY GARRY MADDOX

Last updated 10:15 16/08/2010

TREVOR COLLINS/Sydney Morning Herald

NEW ROAD: Karen Jacobsen, a Queensland singer who has been living in New York for 10 years, is the voice of GPS units in Australia.

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Could drivers be finding in their GPS units something more than just their way home? Are American Jill or Espanol Paulina becoming ''the other woman'' for harried males who spend hours each day on the road? Are women driving to work fantasising about an evening with Irish Sean?

Karen Jacobsen, a little-known singer known as ''Australian Karen'' in millions of TomToms, NavMans and other GPS units around the world, learnt a couple of years ago that she had an underground fan club of smitten drivers.

''I started to be contacted by people thanking me for getting them through a dark lonely road in Italy or being lost in the Black Forest in Germany or around Los Angeles on the freeways or taking them to school and back,'' Ms Jacobsen said. ''It's increased to the point where I've realised people really do have an intimate relationship with the voice in their GPS system.''

The American writer Bruce Feiler wondered in The New York Times recently whether the GPS unit was rewriting the rules of male-female relationships after confessing that he had fallen for the automated voice that had ''guided me effortlessly through the maze of freeways and road rage like a graceful hostess - unflappable, efficient and with just enough sex appeal to give some sizzle to my protracted absence from my wife''.

He quickly realised he was not alone. ''At sites like gpspassion.com and pdastreet.com, the number of lewd comments about the voices of American Jill or Australian Karen seem more suited to a convention of 900-number [adult entertainment line] users.''

Ms Jacobsen, who has lived in New York for 10 years, is always meeting people who feel they know her already because of her voice. ''They'll want to tell me right away the story of the time we were travelling in this city or that country and what happened,'' she said.

Jacobsen is not surprised that the connection matters to drivers. ''You're on that dark lonely road on your own in the car, you don't know where you are and this voice, even though its coming from a machine, seems like your companion. It's something that you're trusting.''

She believes the voice on the GPS unit can help relationships by stopping arguments between couples about directions.

''They take it out on the third-party GPS. It's kind of like a community service - reducing the amount of angst between couples in the car.''

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The chief executive of Relationships Australia NSW, psychologist Anne Hollonds, agrees that GPS units are easing tension on the road between couples by ''outsourcing the navigation role''.

And Ms Hollonds is not surprised that drivers are having an emotional response to the voice.

''The car is actually a very intimate environment,'' she said. ''A lot of people will say they have their most meaningful conversations - with their partner or their kids - in the car. It's like a bubble.''

Ms Jacobsen's new career started when she recorded almost 50 hours of script for a text-to-speech system. Having now achieved a strange kind of fame, she is taking it for a spin.

Her latest CD is called Take A Little Drive. (And, no, it doesn't include lyrics like ''at the next intersection, turn left''.) She also has a personal development podcast called Directions For Life and has shot a pilot for a TV show called Travel the World With the GPS Girl.

''Growing up as a little girl in Mackay in north Queensland, I always wanted my songs - my voice - to be coming out of the car radio,'' Jacobsen said. ''Now, all these years later, my voice is coming out of the GPS.''

- © Fairfax NZ News