Waze Update Adds Real-Time Voice Alerts For Hazards And Heavy Traffic
February 8, 2011
In an effort to make your daily commute less stressful and hopefully much safer, the popular and completely free social navigation app, Waze, has been updated with the ability to generate and receive real-time voice alerts for hazards based on your current location.
With the latest version of Waze, if you come across a road hazard of any type you can alert your fellow wazers by recording a brief voice description of the event within a few taps. Other users heading in the same direction will be warned of this potentially dangerous or time-wasting hazard by your personal voice-alert and may even be rerouted so they can completely avoid it.
“Everyday, drivers are faced with any number of dangers on the road including ice, accidents, and flooding for example. The unpredictable nature of these hazards and lack of immediate road data leaves drivers vulnerable to the conditions ahead,” said Noam Bardin, CEO of waze. “The only way this information can be collected and distributed in real-time is by the initiative of group-minded individuals and a means to warn their fellow drivers.”Since Waze utilizes live crowdsourced traffic information to provide turn-by-turn navigation, it's not absolutely imperative that you report hazards via this new method, but it will certainly be appreciated by the Waze community and hopefully the favor will be returned. Waze v2.1 also features Retina-optimized graphics and the ability to thank other users for their timely reports. At this time, real-time voice alerts are only available to iPhone users, but the Android, Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows versions will be receiving the same functionality in the near future, which should help increase the frequency of these handy alerts.
