Another area in which CoPilot shines during drive time is route recalculation. Imagine you are driving along and CoPilot suggests that you make a right hand turn. However, the street that you would be turning onto is closed due to roadwork so you have to drive past the street. Within a few hundred feet CoPilot figures out that you're off route and immediately calculates a new route for you to get to your appointed destination. This takes only a few seconds instead of the original 30 to 60 seconds when the route was first calculated.

This can be a real frustration saver when you are driving through areas with congestion that you want to avoid or lots of roadwork. It also helps when you simply just miss a maneuver. A nice touch that CoPilot has in moving map display mode is that the level of detail on the map changes depending on how fast you are driving. The faster you go, the less detail you get. It allows you to focus on your intended route of travel, which is highlighted in a bright color on the map, at a glance. When you slow down the detail increases greatly so you can see the side streets and easily get a visual correlation between your physical location on the road and the position of your vehicle on the moving map.

Once you have executed all your driving maneuvers and have arrived at your destination, CoPilot announces your arrival and is ready to start navigating a new route. CoPilot saves your recently selected destinations in its "Favorites" list of destinations for quick selection in the future.

CoPilot's future improvements
One feature that wasn't complete yet, but should be awesome when it's finished, is CoPilot's integration with the Messages application on the Auto PC. When finished, CoPilot will extract traffic congestion information from the Traffic folder of the messages application and apply that information when calculating your travel routes. Using this, CoPilot will route you around traffic problems that have been reported in your area. This sort of integration, if it works up to expectations, will cause the Auto PC with CoPilot to be a real winner.

TravRoute is also working on polishing the user interface of CoPilot to be Auto PC compliant and to make use of speech as much as is practical. UI (user interface) consistency on the Auto PC is far more important than on a PC because changes in UI paradigm between applications distract the user. Requiring the driver of the car to remember what UI paradigm a given application uses while driving is an unnecessary drain on the driver's concentration, particularly on a system such as the Auto PC where the driver can easily switch between applications with a simple spoken command.

One of the main areas that I found fault with in the user interface was the lack of immediate feedback when pressing a key to issue a command to CoPilot. For instance, I would press a key to have CoPilot calculate a new route and often times it would appear to not be responding to my key press. Nothing changed on the screen, no audio prompt, but in reality it was busy calculating the route. Since there was no response I would think that I just pressed the "joystick" on the Clarion AutoPC incorrectly to generate an Enter, and I'd press Enter again. I would end up several keystrokes ahead of CoPilot. This would also happen when manually changing the map detail level while driving.