Google Maps Offers a Number of Different Voices for Your Navigating Pleasure

Where would we be without GPS on our phones? "Lost" is probably the answer to that question, but thankfully, Google Maps and apps like it have kept that from being a regular problem for most people.

Even great navigation comes with its own challenges, though, and those challenges include being annoyed by whatever voice is telling you when to turn left. Thankfully, there's something you can do about it.

Fortunately, there's an easy solution for those who might be bothered by the default voice on Google Maps: You can simply change it to a different voice. To change the voice on Google Maps, you should first open the app. From there, navigate to Settings and click on Navigation. Then, select Voice Selection, and choose the voice that you'd like to hear whenever you need navigation help.

You can follow a very similar process to change the language on Google Maps. After you change the voice settings, you should hear whatever voice you selected the next time you try to navigate somewhere, hopefully making your trip just a little bit smoother.

Google Assistant and Google Maps may be owned by the same internet giant, but they exist as separate entities, at least for the moment. So while you can use Google Assistant as a hands-free way to navigate wherever you want to go, all of the voice options that are currently available via the Google Assistant are not available on Google Maps. At the moment, Google Maps doesn't allow for voices to be added outside of the process outlined above.

Waze — which is also owned by Google — offers additional voice options that you can peruse as well.

Waze even occasionally features celebrity voices that are typically tied into some sort of promotion. In the past, Owen Wilson's Lightning McQueen and Morgan Freeman himself have been available to help you navigate, at least for a limited time.

Google Maps is a very helpful navigation tool, but it can also lead to wonderful moments of levity, as was the case when TikTok user @xmandahx found herself on Google Maps collecting a takeout meal. The video she posted about her find went semi-viral, in part because she so clearly appeared to be hungover.

Of course, this person was able to find themselves because of the cars that Google uses to map every corner of the world. The cars are meant to offer a street-level view, and they obviously catch people doing a variety of different activities as a result. In this case, a poor woman was just hungover and looking forward to eating whatever she had just had delivered.