I REMEMBER the first time I noticed. I was driving to Boston from my home in Brooklyn after an extended trip to California. In Los Angeles, the voice of my brand-new portable navigation device had guided me effortlessly through the maze of freeways and road rage like a graceful hostess  unflappable, efficient and with just enough sex appeal to give some sizzle to my protracted absence from my wife. Now, stuck on I-95 in Stamford, Conn., my charming companion had somehow been switched to a stern English schoolmarm.

Who replaced my Angelina Jolie with Margaret Thatcher, I thought. Has someone been snooping around my turn-by-turn directions? And that’s when I realized.

I had fallen for my GPS voice.

And I’m not alone, it turns out. At sites like gpspassion.com and pdastreet.com, the number of lewd comments about the voices of American Jill or Australian Karen seem more suited to a convention of 900-number users. A gay couple I know, meanwhile, had the opposite reaction. They were so turned off by the preinstalled female navigatrix that they switched her for a man’s voice, because “we find the women too judgmental.”

This spring, Gawker published an item about a television actor whose wife caught him alone in his car, enraptured by “the dulcet tones of the automated voice system.”