I gave up on the voice control on my PRIME a long time ago. I command "CALL HOME", it asks three times, and turn on radio station 1.
I personally have concluded that, if I were to get into the habit of using them, a few such commands could be useful. Most importantly, it can help keep my eyes off the screen and on the road. Still, without a doubt, it’s a rather crude and limited-capability voice-recognition system. It definitely needs a large infusion of neural-net technology!
It has some good days that the car seem so understand what I am saying without a hitch, but I would say more than half of the times, it just refuse to listen to me. So inconsistent, it aggregates hell out of me. Google Assistant is far more capable.
I am sure my wife thinks it's just like "my husband" too. Since we now have a single car for both of us, she drives the car more than I do.
Beat Sonic makes some bypass device. I did it on my old car (not with Beat Sonic) because I wanted to add a backup camera to the factory display. From there it went to mirroring my phone to pulling the audio from the HDMI and eventually to flying a drone with a playstation controller while watching the video feed through the stock nav. That was about 5-6 years ago though. Even in my other old car, 2004 CTS-V, you could play DVDs through the nav screen and there was a "feature" (really a bug) that allowed the video to keep playing while driving if you pressed 2 buttons at the same time for a sec. I like doing it to play music videos. You dont have to watch them, but if you're at a stop light or there are passengers in the car, it adds to the journey. I like the idea of mirroring my phone in my car, but dislike that even if you do it in the Prime, you have to basically choose top 1/2 of the display or bottom, not both. Either the map works (which is always displayed up top) or the video works while driving, but not both at the same time. That bothers me more than it should. But seriously, the video feature is useless to me. It should at least work at stop lights without having to engage the emergency brake.
On the UK car, we have "Mirrorlink". And there are phone apps out there to use this connectivity protocol to allow full smartphone mirroring and control from the car screen. But personally, I find the idea of someone driving along with Youtube or Netflix playing on their car screen, terrifying! It seems extremely distracting and dangerous - not just to themselves, but to everyone on the road. So to me, purveyors of such apps should examine their consciences and ask themselves whether they happy that they may be putting people's lives at risk by offering such apps. Apps that allow limited access on the car screen to phone apps, in a safe manner, are fine though by me, and potentially very useful. But the developers of Mirrorlink seem to have lost interest in Mirrorlink, and for example, the Android Auto phone app does not support Mirrorlink, and there are no certified Mirrorlink apps that will run on my phone, that support Android Auto.
I agree...….My Prius vs a friend's Jeep vs a daughter's Honda.....My 2017 Prius Advance I find lacking. :{
