Just wondering.....I find the voice recognition stuff has a hard time understanding me, I don't know if it is me, my southern accent, or what??? Has anybody else had any issues with this or is it just me. This is my first vehicle with this capability, so maybe I am just asking it the wrong things. This is on a 2012 Four with solar and advanced voice recognition. Maybe I shouldn't be using ya'll when giving it a command. Charlie
It can be a challenge sometimes. It helps if the cabin is quiet and you wait to speak until you get the beep. But, to be honest, even I have a hard time understanding some folks from the south.
You might actually have to practice some of the phrases until you can get the south out of the phrase. I think much of the speech recognition process relies on pacing of your words, enunciating, sometimes overly so. You will just have to get the list of all the commands, and start running through them to see which ones you are having trouble with! Some inflection changes may be all that is needed! Y'all get back to us, let us know how y'all make out!
hehe......make that misunderstood....no wonder the thing can't understand me!! Just for the record, I suppose my accent falls somewhere between the alligator hunters in the southern swamps and the people from the northern states. Before I retired, I had to go to school at least a couple of times a year and I had classes with people from all parts of the US and Canada. A lot of New Yorkers had accents as bad as southern accents, Californians seemed to be the most accent neutral , at least IMHO. I will try some of your recommendations , thanks . Charlie
I work with a guy from the Philippines, he came to the US when he was 20 or so, I met him in 80. It took years to get the Tagalog accent on the English wording down enough to understand him. Not surprisingly he too has a voice command system, it took some work, but he has it pretty much down now. Just don't make him mad, All bets are off! This reminds me of the latest Star Trek movie that came out. Checkov tries to do an Intra-Ship announcement, his recognition code contains two V words, he pronounces Weactor, weactor, Invalid Code, Access Denied! Then he has to force Vvvv ictor .... Vvvictor... to get access. If Checkov can have a problem, why not the rest of us in the real world!!
I played with mine today and was suprised..it actually worked! I rattled off the address, street, city and state...and waited.....I thought it hadn't heard.then.finally, it said Pennsylvania, then offered two street names for me to choose..then finally the actual address. I had spoken it as 3254..and it got it right. Amazing. I was almost home by the time if figured it all out.but it did work..and without having to repeat.
My Prius seems to understand my California accent OK. My biggest problem with the voice recognition is impatience with the wordy instructions. I wish the menu included a beginner and pro option. BTW; I have played word (syllable) games with the voice recognition and am forming the opinion that the number of syllables or length of the sound may be more critical than the exact word phonetics.
The only way I can get it to work by voice is to first say enter state, then enter city, then enter street, and then it will ask you to enter number. What I have found is if you are in a large metropolitan area it takes a long time, and seems to get confused easily. iPad ?
If you press the speak button on the steering wheel you don't have to listen if you know what it is about to ask. Just press the speak button and wait for the beep before you speak. iPad ?
We had an 09 Nissan Cube which was our first car with voice recognition. It had a sub-program to learn and better understand your voice. It took a good solid 5 minutes repeating things it ask you to say but once done it worked extremely well. I've given up on the speech commands in the Prius as it's too slow and clunky. Now, I simply rely on the speed contact list I have set up on the NAV screen for phone calls.
HaveNoCents, Thanks for the tip on the steering wheel button, maybe that will take some of the slowness out of the process, I knew the button was there and had been using it, just not to shortcut the process.
Speech recognition is iffy at best. I have never even tried to use Pearls. Not enough processing power in the car. Even using the Android phone, which goes off to the internet to check what many hundreds of computers think I said, it's still iffy. I prefer the buttons. Works every time, except when -my- processor isn't working well (I press the wrong button).
If you think a southern (US) accent is bad, imagine these guys trying to get speak recognition working. dont_imbed_http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b88_1330182010 PS. Sorry for the OT nature of the vid. Someone posted it on another site in reponse to an elderly driver towing a caravan for 20km down the wrong side of a freeway here recently. I just cant get over how hard it is to understand these guys accents (and I've got Scottish ancestry).
Another tip is to not try too hard. Don't speak slowly or over enunciate. It's programmed to understand natural language at a normal tempo. That doesn't fix everything or work every time, but often "suspendguidance" works better than "Suh Spend Guydance"
