Using Waze this weekend, many of their spoken instructions have the word ‘GOOGLE’ inserted in the middle of a sentence. This is so far past reasonable advertising and borders on mind manipulation and an attempt at subliminal control. I am very disappointed in Google and hope they reconsider this (IMHO) disgusting action.
This is an unnecessarily hostile over-reaction to what is a mistake in the Text-To-Speech system.
Inserting the word “Google” into the spoken instructions could hardly be interpreted as advertising. If it was, it would be a very poor way to do so and Google is pretty good at advertising. Describing it as “mind manipulation”, “subliminal control” and “disgusting” is ridiculous.
Waze staff have been notified of the problem with TTS and this will hopefully be fixed soon.