josejb, thanks for the reply! You are right, the female voice does sound HORRIBLE, that is why for some time now I have been desperatley trying to determine at what point they switched to the male. I have driven one of the new 3 series and it has the male which sounds so much better.

I have bought a TCU for about 500 bucks that ends with part number 711... unfortunatley I have to take it to the dealer to code it to work so I don't even know if it has the better voice recognition. The thing that struck me was that it costs 500 dollars for the voice input module to add to the existing TCU... WTF?? Seemed silly to go that direction if I could get the newest generation TCU for the same price.