For those of you familiar with navigation software for the PC, CoPilot is a familiar name. It's designed to run on a notebook computer, optionally equipped with a GPS, to provide turn-by-turn navigation as you drive. It has a speech driven user interface to enable safe driving while navigating. If you get off route, it quickly recalculates updated driver directions for you, and all the streets in the US fit on one CD-ROM. It has won many awards as well-regarded navigation software on a PC. Users give it a big "thumbs up" too, as evidenced by reading stories from users on TravRoute's Web site.

Now a full-featured version of this product is about to be released for the Auto PC! It''s slated to ship on September 15th. I have obtained the latest beta copy of the product and installed it on my Auto PC. My initial reaction is that this product will be true to its PC-based relatives and garner praises from users and reviewers alike.

Installation
Installation is simple: just insert the program's CD into the Auto PC's CD-ROM drive and installation automatically starts. You are walked through a series of steps to install the software, train some new voice commands, and install a patch to the Auto PC's serial driver. It turns out that the serial driver on the Auto PC had some buffer overflow problems under heavy computing loads that would confuse the GPS. This patch fixes that problem.

Once installed you can start CoPilot by voice or using the Start button on the Auto PC. Note that if your Auto PC has more than a few new programs installed on it, you will need to go into the Setup program of the Auto PC, choose the Speech Commands menu item, then the Global Commands menu item, then select which of up to ten programs you want to start by voice.

For instance, since CoPilot effectively replaces the Directions application on the Auto PC, you could choose to not be able to voice activate Directions anymore, but instead CoPilot. Does this sound sort of confusing? Well, it is until you understand that the Auto PC allows you to choose up to ten words that it will recognize in what is called the "Global Grammar". These are the words that the Auto PC will recognize right after you say "Auto PC" or press the push to talk button. The reason it is limited to ten words is that the more words the Auto PC must recognize at any one time, the greater the chance of a misrecognition. To reduce this problem, Microsoft chose to limit the user to ten words.