Nav. System Blues -

Hmmmmm...... Your problem is not unheardof on the board. Many times, the problem is holding down the button too long. On my Prius I quickly push and release the button. Anywhere from immediately up to a few seconds later I hear a beep. I then say "Home." Then the car shows me the local parks! Actually, the recognition in my car is pretty good. Try pressing and releasing and then waiting for the beep.

 

Thanks for the pointers! I hadn't heard too much about voice recognition and thought the button referred to the telephone or something. With the voice commands, dealing with the NAV system while driving will be much easier.

 

How do you program the NAV system for 'Home'? That would be a good feature, if it works.

 

To set a location as "Home:"

Read the manual. ;-)

Or, press the "Menu" key, then select "My Places."

If the point is already registered, press "Edit," then locate the point in the list and press it.

If the point is not registered, press "Register" and use the appropriate method (address, intersection, POI, etc.) to enter the location. Once entered, you'll be presented with the Edit screen.

On the Edit screen, press "Attribute." This is poorly named; all it does is allow you to assign a place to one of the six one-touch destination slots. Simply touch a slot to assign the current place to it.

The first slot is your "Home." These one-touch destinations are available at the bottom of the Destination screen, and are the only destinations (aside from emergency services) that you may enter while the vehicle is in motion. Unless you take appropriate measures and sever the right control line. (See FAQ...)

 

All that said, I can't for the life of me get the nav to recognize the "Go Home" or "Home" voice commands. If the vehicle is stopped, thereby reducing cabin noise to near zero, I get at best a 10% recognition accuracy with these words. At highway speeds, I've NEVER been able to get these commands to be recognized.

The system misrecognizes "Home" as either "Bank," "Golf Course," "Italian," "Coffee Shop," "Higher Education," "Zoom In," or "AM Radio." Go figure. Most of those aren't even nearly phoenetically close.

I speak in a clear midwestern dialect, know how the voice recognition system operates, am without noticable speach impediments, and have tried just about every way of inflecting "Go Home" as I can think of.

Basically, my opinion is that the voice recognition is a neat but utterly useless system that doesn't work very well. I'm just glad that "Auto Distruct" was omitted as a voice command.