![get new voices for waze get new voices for waze](https://www.cnet.com/a/img/P5xoOf4f8OeSlKR4yJuuiQOukh4=/940x0/2021/08/03/b14569cb-3969-449b-b145-8f36011a1124/waze-halo-key-visual-horizontal.jpg)
I recently got an expensive speeding ticket in New York while on a project. You only have to watch 20 seconds to get the point that all this data is being tracked. See the data visualization of Paris traffic here, which shows how the streets of NYC wake up in the morning and basically keeps going. It is big data. No surprise this creates a lot of data points for data geeks to play with. In Washington DC, the city is using Waze to fix potholes here. It’s also a way for city and infrastructure planner to think about the problems. It’s getting more attention and credibility. The City of Los Angeles announced a formal agreement here to share official transportation data with Waze – creating a new stream of enterprise data to merge with its crowd-sourced data feed. The Atlanta makes a half-dozen rebuttals against the police’s argument here. It’s a little bit controversial. A few police departments have sent letters to Google asking that Waze remove it’s police recognition function, implying that people who want to stalk or harm police officers can use it track police whereabouts. It’s kind of dangerous. Yes, it has voice commands, and hand-motion commands, but honestly, most people spend their time clicking their phone while driving. Oddly, I feel my traffic contribution matters. While I am not a real internet giver (don’t really do Yelp, Amazon, and TripAdvisor reviews), I am almost a compulsive Waze contributor. You can redeem points for new voices like Stephen Colbert, and Colonel Sanders (yes, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken). You get points for reporting new incidents and accidents (6 points), and 1 point for confirming or cancelling an existing report. It’s a lot of fun. You can choose from more than 20 different voices and languages. People have them sighted at different places, but clearly there was policeman somewhere in the road ahead. As you can see in the screen shot below, there was definitely a policeman somewhere in our future. It’s fluid and approximate. The reason it is not perfectly accurate is that conditions change. It was all crowd-sourced, and all useful information for out-of-town people like us. Police, objects in the road, cars broken down on the shoulder. It works. On a recent road trip with my wife, we drove to Key West covering close to 1,900 miles during the week-long adventure. drivers) as 50 million+ people roam the streets. Indicative of the modern times, the information is completely crowd-sourced by users (a.k.a. Google bought this Israeli company in 2013 for $1.1 billion. This simple 45 second video will give you a good taste for it here. For those who feel this is similar to Google Maps – it is. I am a huge fan of Waze. For those who have not used it, it’s a basic map app which tells you the most efficient route to your destination, which factors in traffic and construction.