Tennis Legend Roger Federer Joins Waze With a Pack of Surprises

As such, running a navigation app on the mobile device behind the wheel is extremely convenient, as most people already plug in their smartphones for a quick charge before they arrive at their destination.

Waze is, without a doubt, a top option, and it's all thanks to the impressive crowdsourcing engine. Compared to Google Maps, which focuses on providing users with an all-in-one mapping platform, Waze focuses specifically on traffic navigation.

This is why the crowdsourcing engine is such a great tool. Users can submit traffic reports, helping not only Waze itself but also the other motorists on the road figure out what happens on their route.

While Waze has a very clear goal – to get users from point A to point B as fast as possible, the application also packs a series of other features to enhance the navigation experience. For example, it comes with custom voice navigation, special moods, and limited-edition vehicle icons that users can activate from the app.

Enter Roger Federer.

One of the best things about Waze is that it regularly gets special-edition content created by the parent company in partnership with celebrities across the world.

The purpose of the efforts is to celebrate certain moments or events, but occasionally, Waze also teams up with famous figures just to provide users with special content.

This is precisely the purpose of the latest pack of improvements now available for Waze users.

This time, the Google-owned company (that's right, Waze is owned by Google, the same company that created Google Maps) launched an update as part of a partnership with Roger Federer. The tennis legend powers a new navigation voice in Waze, essentially serving as a driving companion when using the app to get instructions to a destination.

Needless to say, Federer joins Waze with a series of voice instructions of his own, so you'll hear all kinds of personalized phrases when this experience is enabled. I won't provide you with any spoilers because discovering how Federer speaks in Waze is pretty fun, but worth knowing is that this navigation experience is available in English, German, and French.

It's unclear if Federer joins Waze only as a limited-time voice option or if the tennis legend will remain available in the navigation app for as long as needed.

Previous limited-edition updates released by Waze could be enabled for only a few weeks before users' settings were restored to the original configuration. Once this happened, enabled the new special experience was no longer possible.

While these updates are pretty exciting for long-time Waze users, the company has bigger things to take care of. The app's reliability is disappointing, to say the least, especially on Android devices.

Bugs have become very common in the Waze world, with the latest updates breaking down essential functionality, such as voice commands. It's not hard to figure out why this is such a critical blunder. Without voice commands, users would be tempted to interact with the app using touch, and doing this while driving is obviously a big no-no. The voice command integration makes it possible to use Waze and configure the navigation hands-free. As such, drivers would be able to keep their eyes on the road while also accessing Waze features.

Unfortunately, the parent company has so far remained tight-lipped on these mishaps, so nobody knows precisely if Waze is at least working on bringing everything back to normal.

Oddly enough, the broken voice commands were considered the intended behavior by Waze, so in theory, the company sees no reason to fix something that's already working as expected.

In the meantime, these updates, including the partnership with Roger Federer, could keep more people on board, as some users are tempted to switch to Google Maps due to the bugs detailed above. Indeed, Google Maps is one of the most solid alternatives, but at the same time, it also lacks the advanced crowdsourcing engine bundled with Waze.

Google Maps also supports traffic incident reporting in some regions, but the feature is very limited. This is the reason Google Maps sometimes imports data from Waze, providing users with information on the location of crashes or traffic jams.

Many people believe Google could eventually merge Google Maps and Waze into an almighty navigation app, particularly because the traffic navigation app can contribute with essential information about what's happening on the road. If this happens, it'll certainly be interesting to see if Google sticks with these limited-edition updates, especially as Waze users seem to love them.

If you want to activate the new Roger Federer experience in Waze, look in the settings screen for the special voice. You can enable it on both Android and iPhone, but keep in mind that not all languages are supported right now.