I concur. These new voices (especially the English Kate (UK) voice) are grating. The original Kate was the only voice to begin with that didn't make my skin crawl every time it spoke, among those that spoke my language, and could pronounce street names. These new ones make me want to drive at high speed into oncoming traffic. Either roll them back or add them as legacy voices. I don't know why you changed them to begin with. Who would have complained about Kate's lovely voice anyway? At this point, I have to take a klonopin just to use the voice directions. Sadly, it really feels like Waze doesn't care. Doesn't Google own them now? I suppose this could just be a plan to drive everyone back to Google maps. I started using Waze because it was so much better than Google maps, but perhaps it is time to reevaluate that.

Please tell me that the nice Kate voice hasn’t been replaced with this new terrible one that is not pleasant to listen to, has awful pronunciation of certain directions and is a far cry from the lovely original Kate’s voice.

This one’s pronunciation of certain directions, such as “go straight on” sounds like a stroppy person who can’t really be bothered to speak and therefore barks a command that is both uncaring and unpleasant.

Please bring back the original Kate. Her voice was consistent. This one jumps all over the place; unnecessarily authoritative, belligerent, not bad sometimes but mostly simply awful to listen to as a whole.

Look forward to hearing some positive news. This current version puts your otherwise excellent app in the same pot as other car navigation systems which are rubbish by comparison.

Stand out from the crowd again like you did before. Continue down this route and you’ll lose people to “other” systems. And that would be a shame for you and us.

After complaining about the split personality of Kate (UK) I am told by Waze support that now Kate has been replaced by the young upstart this is the new voice of Kate. Is Kate short for Bob? (see Blackadder UK comedy for the joke reference), since new Kate is clearly a young posh male voice. I can tell you it’s much worse that real Kate since it does not know how to pronounce street names correctly. Please bring back the original Kate who I have been using forever, probably at least 10 years. By all means keep your new male voice but at least give it a different name so it can be avoided.

As confirmed by a customer support member, it seems like a few voices for directions and alerts have changed.
I've been having what I thought was a issue with Kate UK voice changing however this seems to be a new thing. I must say I found the old Kate a lot more easier to use and a lot more "joyful".
So maybe we could have some sort of legacy mode that brings back the old voices? As for some people this change is quite big after getting used to the original for so long.

The new voice is jarring with incorrect pronunciation. The original Kate was calming and easy to listen to, there was nothing wrong with old voice so I have no idea why it's been changed

It appears the recent app update has corrected the '2 voice' bug.
'Kate' - the English version with street names - now has a deeper voice which is not so easy on my ears as before. I would suggest a return to the earlier one. I appreciate this is a personal preference - please mention my comment to the app technical team.

Quite. The original Kate had a pleasant voice. The new one is awful and seems to be two separate voices, one of which can't enunciate properly. We only have two choices for UK voice with street names, Kate and Thomas, and they've both been ruined.