When I was at this Toyota R&D center tour (more will come on that soon), I had a bit of an epiphany. I’m pretty certain it’s not the epiphany Toyota was hoping I’d have, but I’m not here to provide epiphanies for major multinational corporations. They don’t own epiphanies, at least not just yet. Anyway, this epiphany happened in the middle of a tech demonstration in a new Toyota showing off some of their new infotainment software. Specifically, the voice commands.
Now, I want to be clear that the epiphany I had covers all cars that use voice commands and not just Toyota. In fact, the updated software Toyota was demonstrating worked quite well and incorporated some thoughtful features, like how their AI assistant now runs on the hardware inside the car, instead of sending all requests into the cloud, for improved speed and, even more importantly, privacy.
The demonstration was given to me by a member of the voice team, and she did a fantastic job of showing the software. My epiphany had nothing to do with her, I want to make that clear. She just happened to be there at the moment it happened.
This was my epiphany: voice controls in a car are, for the most part, useless. They’re a tech gimmick, something that we thought we wanted for so long that once we got it, we can’t admit to ourselves that, really, we don’t care. Here’s my question: does anyone actually use the voice commands in their car?
Actually, I maybe should qualify this a bit. I think voice commands sometimes make sense when it comes to using the nav system, and asking it to take you somewhere, because in most in-car nav systems, it’s a pain to do otherwise, and it commands a lot of your focus and attention. So, I’ll admit that voice controls for that one particular thing makes sense. But for almost everything else? I don’t understand the appeal.
Take changing temperature, for example. You can say something like “Hey Toyota, I’m hot,” and then the car will lower the HVAC temperature. If you meant that you’re hot in the context of how sexy you are, that information will be lost on your car, so sorry about that. It’s not you.
When the basic “I’m hot/lower temperature” exchange is written out, it seems almost reasonable, but in practice? It’s awkward and stupid. It’s not exactly quick, and it’s definitely not any easier than just reaching over to the climate knob or buttons and turning the temperature down a few degrees. You can usually even do it while talking about something else to another person in your car or while listening to music or whatever. You just kind of do it, almost without thinking.
But when you have to tell your car to do something like that, you have to address the car, pause as it recognizes the attention word (or you hit a button to make it start listening) and then tell it you’re hot or cold or reduce/raise the temperature or whatever, then wait for it to acknowledge that, repeat what it did back to you, and then change the temperature.
Or you could just turn a little knob a few clicks.
Don’t believe me? Here’s that situation in action:
It actually works fairly well, considering, but it’s still a slow ass-pain compared to just moving the big temperature-control knob that is right there. The same thing goes for voice commands for almost any physical control in the car, like adjusting the volume. Using the knob is always quicker and easier and less obtrusive than talking to your car and asking it to do it.
Here’s another example, in a Kia, for turning on heated seats:
Here you have to remember to say “seat warmer” instead of “heated seats,” which it doesn’t understand. And, again, while this technically works, there’s a button right there that you don’t have to ask to do anything. You just poke it and make it do your bidding, which, in this case, is gently warming your ass.
I can’t fathom the point of any of these voice commands. They make nothing easier. They take tasks that you can do while listening to music or talking or thinking about something – all while focusing on driving – and turn them into a an irritating little conversation with your car that forces you to pay attention in ways that just instinctively pushing a button or turning a knob don’t. Sure, you may not be doing anything physically, but mentally getting your car’s attention verbally and asking it to do things is far more distracting than letting muscle memory guide your hand to a knob.
If you really want to hate voice commands, and perhaps even the very concept of speech itself, and maybe even all of humanity, you can watch this Volkswagen voice command instructional video, which combines an inane script and cloying acting direction to make an experience about as annoying as walking around with your underpants filled with cat litter and marbles:
I’m so sorry. That was terrible. And confusing. And stupid. And it sure as hell didn’t make me think I really need or want to tell my car any commands.
Again, for navigation, okay, I can see how voice commands have some use. Fine. If you’re connecting a phone with CarPlay or Android Auto, then you likely have that feature already. But I think if every automaker announced that all of their unique voice commands would be gone tomorrow, hardly anyone would really care.
Maybe I’m wrong here; maybe there are people out there who really love using voice commands to adjust volume or temperature or to open tailgates. Maybe they have valid reasons, like, say, they’re legally blind drivers or something like that. It’s certainly possible. But I’m really skeptical.
I think voice commands are the sorts of things that, if used, get used during the first few months of ownership of the car, and then are promptly and happily forgotten about, because they don’t actually make life any better. Maybe we can call this experiment in voice controls a success, quietly mothball it, and move on to more important and interesting things.
How’s that sound to everyone? If it’s cool by you, just focus on your computer, say “Hey Autopian, to hell with voice commands,” and that should do it!
Top graphic images: DepositPhotos.com; Toyota
Voice commands do make things easier and faster when all the buttons are removed!
They love it in China though. People talk to their cars all the time over there.
It kinda explains why most new Chinese cars have screen-focused interfaces, because there is no need for physical knobs and buttons when most people prefer to use voice commands.
It’s still a bit ick to me, but it appears to be a vast cultural difference between them and the West.
I like voice commands for GPS and radio.
Both work well in my Shelby
Only the navigation works well in my Toyota while the radio controls work when they want to.
Hey car, show me a list of businesses mildly adjacent to what I asked for that gave you money to pimp me out as a customer.
Nah. I don’t need that from my car. I have a phone.
Hey car, set temperature to seventy two
” Set radio to nintysevenpointtwo, correct?”
No. Temperature
“Searching for satellite radio TEMPERATURE”
Fuck you and shut up.
“I’m sorry I didn’t understand, please chose a command from the list of available categories, they are …”
I found the BUTTON to shut it the hell off.
Good mood disappear function complete.
Nav voice is even worse.
Oh boy… I concede that there are uses for voice commands, but I hate talking to machines, I feel silly, like we are pretending that the machine is sentient. If you have a passenger, it’s just embarrassing and you typically can’t say the name of the car manufacturer without getting into a dispute with the car. What I really want is a command like – “shut the heck up and stop listening for X minutes”. My wife on the other hand, LOVES to talk to her car.. it greets her when she gets in and butts into our conversations, warns of pot holes and even makes bad jokes. Even worse she has carplay integrated with Siri and can send gibberish text messages to me and the kids while dodging potholes on her way home from work.
Same. I hate talking to machines. I can barely tolerate phone calls.
This article reminds me of a “voice command R2D2” toy I acquired a couple of decades ago. It was maddeningly horrible at doing anything. Nice display piece with the batteries out, though.
Thank you for this piece and I hope automakers are listening (well, reading…)
I hate using voice commands. Even it if worked flawlessly (never does), I don’t want to be talking to my technology. It’s tremendously awkward, with our without passengers, and it interrupts whatever music you have on. It’s jarring and unpleasant.
I think it was the Rivian CEO who said buttons don’t matter anymore because we can do everything with voice commands. Please no.
I’m on my second personal car with voice commands, and I don’t think I’ve ever used them. I only use voice for android auto, and even that is limited to asking for a particular song or using navigation.
How about they work on having the car tell you what sensor triggered the check engine light instead of having a code that requires a separate machine to read.
That’s brilliant
Better yet: when the engine pops a code, display an ad on the screen for a code reader.
You gotta think BUSINESS.
I grew up with a horrible speech impediment. It was like I didn’t speak English at all, just this weird grunting thing. It was worse than Jodie Foster in Nell. All the therapy in the world didn’t help. But strangely singing lessons over a summer made it to where people don’t believe I had a speech impediment (long story, singing right requires you put your entire body, including your mouth in the exact right position, which helped me a ton).
Anyway, today, nobody knows I ever had a speech impediment. Other than Voice Controls. I have more problems than a Scot using voice control.
https://youtu.be/MNuFcIRlwdc
That is fascinating. I wonder what in the speech rec training causes it to fail to understand you. Maybe the way you speak has a measurably different frequency distribution as part of your adaptation to whatever caused the speech impediment, and that distribution isn’t in the training set?
My working idea requires some input.
Do you have problems with voice recognition when you have a cold?
I have a theory involving my nasal tone (developed intentionally because I blew too much air through my nose as a kid) and the percussive nature of consonants. Your nose adds a lot of high frequency content to your voice and I’m guessing that computers are looking for how these high frequencies are behaving because there is likely not a big change in frequencies between a basso profundo and a coloratura soprano with now their sinuses respond to the impulse waveforms of consonants.
> Do you have problems with voice recognition when you have a cold?
Good question. I don’t use voice recognition, other than automated phone trees, and those are terrible all the time, cold or not.
Nasalisation does have a characteristic impact on frequency distribution, not so much on the high frequency side (that’s where s and sh live), but they do affect vowel formants (F1 and F2)
https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/115/5_Supplement/2541/543375/Formant-shift-in-nasalization-of-vowels
So if your speech is unusually nasal or less nasal than average, there’s a chance it may affect speech recognition.
Another one of the thousand features I didn’t ask for.
Can “slow down” or “speed up” or “turn right” or “turn left” be far behind?
The only time I use voice commands in my Ioniq 5 is to have it call my wife.
Didn’t speech recognition come as a feature on the Apple Mac some 20 or 30 years ago? Just as gimmick’y then, remember playing a bit with it and then forgetting all about it.
I don’t even use Siri
Neither do I.
Useless. Had it in 2 cars. Faster Easier more accurate to do it yourself
Okay, so I kinda enjoy walking around with my underwear full of cat litter and marbles, but I’m willing to concede that could just be me. But, yeah, the VW video is something I don’t want in my underwear or anywhere near my person.
What’s also super annoying about vehicle voice commands is the frequency with which, at least in my Lucid, the voice command interface thinks it hears the attention word. When this happens, whatever I am listening to gets muted, and I have to wait for the car to try to figure out what I didn’t ask it to do, and then say something like, “I’m sorry. I didn’t get that.” It’s absolutely maddening.
GOML 5 Sigma here. The DMEUAATSAPIDH Dept wants a word.
Dont make me use an app that solves a problem I dont have.
I tried calling my wife using voice commands, stopped at a light on a hot day with the windows down. My car says “would you like me to call wife?”. The guy in the car next to me yells “NO!”. I would have been pissed had I not been laughing so hard.
Voice commands are also particularly useless with small children in the car who don’t understand that they need to remain quiet for a handful of seconds, a completely unreasonable ask from their perspective.
Right in line with stopping them from yeeting off tall objects to prevent injury.
voice recognition systems are designed by engineers.
engineers are typically logical beings.
the systems have logic structures built into them.
users often do NOT think like engineers, and perhaps have an unusual accent or speech patterns.
so the system gets used in a way different than the designers had anticipated, responds poorly and so users stop using it.
ya, it’s a parlor trick that does not generate value…
No.
And this isn’t THAT new. In theory, my ’11 BMW has some voice control capabilities. I have not used it even once in the going on 15 years I have owned the thing.
Early on I tried using the voice commands in my ’11 BMW to make phone calls… but it had a very difficult time understanding a Texas accent. I’m from Houston, not Hemphill, so I’m not that far off from Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite. OK, so Rather’s a Heights Rat and Cronkite graduated from San Jacinto High, but you get the drift.
I have no doubt it would misunderstand my New England self as well.
Today I use voice commands for calls, texts, navigation, and selecting music / podcasts. None can be done while moving through the touchscreen.
I would LOVE if others things buried menus deep were voice controls. Resetting TPMS was mentioned here that then rings especially true to me as I just switched our vehicles to winter tires and and always had to look up how to initiate TPMS learning on each vehicle. (Which of course if vehicle specific)
I like asking test cars to fart. Fart! So far, most will give me the funny pfffft noise I ask for, with the exception of one random answer from the ID.Buzz that spelled out “p f f f f t” and the Ioniq 9 saying it doesn’t do sound effects.
Aside from that, I’ll sort of come to voice commands’ defense when it comes to this:
Voice commands are the most useful when the rest of the interior is an unusable hellscape of screen-based or slick-panel controls. When there is no easy-to-adjust knob or button, voice commands can sort of alleviate the pain of looking over to find the right place on a cursed screen to touch so your butt quits baking after the heated seats get up to temp. You don’t have to look away (and potentially eat guardrail) to operate a voice control.
This, of course, is a workaround for a problem that shouldn’t exist, and one that relies heavily on whether or not the damn system can even understand you in the first place. Like, good frickin’ luck if you have an accent, vocal condition, speech impediment, or in some cases, a female voice. I’ve gotten so angry at voice control systems in the past for not understanding me in the slightest that they become their own kind of distraction, which is why I typically recommend testing them out while parked and looking in the manual for the exact verbiage the car wants for the commands you’re most likely to use. If they won’t work for you, welp. Should’ve bought a better car with physical controls, mate.
tl;dr—put the damn buttons back in cars, you cowards. Buttons are better and safer to use.
The Leaf gave me MULTIPLE TYPES of farts!: https://www.instagram.com/p/DQSqnaVkRnO/
As if people needed more reasons not to buy Hyundai products.
Tesla, I’m hot. Let me out! OPEN THE DOOR, LET ME OUT!!!
Sorry Dave. I can’t do that…
I generally agree……the one area I do use voice commands in my Audi Allroad are for the nav system (which works pretty well once you learn the right key words) and the phone, which works VERY well, both at picking the right person to call and being able to understand them clearly without having to hold the damn phone up to my ear. However, I rarely call someone or take a call in my car – it does happen, but not frequently.
It’s also the reason we’re no longer in the market for a new car, the enormous touch screens that require you to look at them in order to do almost anything just don’t work for us.