Vehicle navigation apparatus providing both automatic guidance and guidance information in response to manual input request

Abstract

A vehicle navigation apparatus in accordance with the present invention includes a CDROM (,) for storing all the data required for navigation processing such as maps and voice data, and a buffer (,-,) for accessing CDROM (,) to prepare beforehand a phrase necessary for the navigation guidance. A control device (,) selects appropriate phrases corresponding to the present vehicle position and reads out the selected phrases from the buffer, (,-,) successively, in response to a request signal supplied from a request sensor (,) which is output in response to the driver's request. The thus processed navigation information data is transformed into voice signals through a decoder (,-,) and output from a speaker (,) as a voice response. The control device (,) checks whether or not a phrase prepared in the buffer (,-,) is a frequently used phrase and replaces this phrase with a new phrase if this phrase is not frequently used. Furthermore, the control device (,) sets discriminating flags to the selected phrases and continuously reads out these phrases with the discriminating flags, in a predetermined order, in accordance with the driver's request, so as to execute voice response processing.