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2019.40.50.1 - Car is mostly deaf to voice commands

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did you RTFM on how to enable it, in the release notes :)


1E1A4E20-7F57-42BF-9968-AD563347739D.jpeg
Yes, it’s enabled in the phone for message access and contact sharing, the “sync messages” option on the car is not visible
 
I have always queried how Tesla manage to release MCU software with so many bugs.

It is not as though they don't know their own hardware, and there are not that many variants compared to say iOS or Windows.

It just points to Elon's entire modus operandi of release, beta test in the field, wait for feedback, and improve... to a point ... then get bored and/or change the team around and focus on other priorities

The strategy is not wrong per se, but these are vehicles, not desktop computers, for heavens sake for which we are repeatedly and correctly instructed the driver must pay attention and be prepared to react in fractions of a second at all times ... not be faffing around trying to get some part of the UI working as it is supposed to ... else you might well be in the field.
 
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Same here. Installed update and now voice doesn't seem to work at all. I like the games etc but we don't need more games with every update. Priority should be improving what is there.

Think from now on its worth not installing the updates until a couple of weeks later.
 
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Adjusting the temperature controls by hand has been one of my gripes with the car so I was excited to hear about the voice command improvements. Installed the update last night. Have not yet done a reboot but will try that a little later on to see if it helps, though I am doubtful given that this seems to rely on some central server to do the processing. Also, connected to my home WiFi (which tends to be pretty good but in case it makes any difference to connectivity just mentioning it here.)

Often, the speech recognition does not even start to happen. The microphone appears and after a few seconds of speaking it makes some suggestions about what to say - and continues to not hear me.

When it does hear me, the transcription appears to be pretty accurate (reminds me of watching the news with subtitles on with the way in which it corrects itself) - which is good.

Unfortunately a lot of things just don't seem to be understood. I managed to turn the air conditioning on and adjust the temperature, but could not turn it off. Could turn on/off seat heaters. Could open the glove box. Could not find places on the map or open the autopilot settings or show the rear camera (suggestions from the release notes and the prompt that appears after a few seconds of it not hearing anything.)

Things I tried:
"Let's go to work" - seems to work (asks me to set my work address as I haven't set it before)
"Turn on the driver seat heater" - works, gets set to high
"Turn off the driver seat heater" - works
"Turn off climate control" - command not understood
"Turn off air conditioning" - command not understood
"Disable air conditioning" - understood (as "disable add condition") but responded with "enabling air conditioning"
"Stop air conditioning" - command not understood
"Set the temperature to 22 degrees" - enables climate control, does not set temperature
"Set the temperature to 22 degrees Celsius" - same as above
"Increase temperature" - raised temperature by 1.5C
"Lower temperature" - lowered temperature by 1.5C
"Open auto pilot settings" - command not understood (example from release notes)
"Open driver settings" - interpreted as "open Android the settings" and not understood
"Show me the rear camera" - command not understood (example from release notes)
"Open the glove box" - opened the glove box
"Where is [nearby road name]?" - command not understood
"Where is Basingstoke?" - command not understood

(The last two were based on a suggestion from the pop-up card.)

If they can sort out the evidently flaky connection and have it respond to the natural commands as expected, it'd be a massive improvement. Ideally though the speech should be processed by the car, even if that's something that is implemented later on. Mobile connectivity is far spottier than dealing with e.g. an Echo device on a home broadband connection and it seems a bit silly to have to tell your car to do something from within it via an Internet service.
 
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... it seems a bit silly to have to tell your car to do something from within it via an Internet service.

Tiny amount of data, huge processing power back at the mothership and only one set of voice recognition code to maintain, is why. But yes, it does require an internet connection of sorts.

However Elon/Spacex are in the process of launching a 12,000 satellite constellation to improve reception - name one other manufacturer that is competing with that!

Alternatively as HAL9000 said

"I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this.
I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over."
 
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Tiny amount of data, huge processing power back at the mothership and only one set of voice recognition code to maintain, is why. But yes, it does require an internet connection of sorts.

However Elon/Spacex are in the process of launching a 12,000 satellite constellation to improve reception - name one other manufacturer that is competing with that!

Starlink isn't designed to work for mobile (i.e. moving) reception, though it could provide reception to static stations which in turn rebroadcast to mobiles
 
Adjusting the temperature controls by hand has been one of my gripes with the car so I was excited to hear about the voice command improvements. Installed the update last night. Have not yet done a reboot but will try that a little later on to see if it helps, though I am doubtful given that this seems to rely on some central server to do the processing. Also, connected to my home WiFi (which tends to be pretty good but in case it makes any difference to connectivity just mentioning it here.)

Often, the speech recognition does not even start to happen. The microphone appears and after a few seconds of speaking it makes some suggestions about what to say - and continues to not hear me.

When it does hear me, the transcription appears to be pretty accurate (reminds me of watching the news with subtitles on with the way in which it corrects itself) - which is good.

Unfortunately a lot of things just don't seem to be understood. I managed to turn the air conditioning on and adjust the temperature, but could not turn it off. Could turn on/off seat heaters. Could open the glove box. Could not find places on the map or open the autopilot settings or show the rear camera (suggestions from the release notes and the prompt that appears after a few seconds of it not hearing anything.)

Things I tried:
"Let's go to work" - seems to work (asks me to set my work address as I haven't set it before)
"Turn on the driver seat heater" - works, gets set to high
"Turn off the driver seat heater" - works
"Turn off climate control" - command not understood
"Turn off air conditioning" - command not understood
"Disable air conditioning" - understood (as "disable add condition") but responded with "enabling air conditioning"
"Stop air conditioning" - command not understood
"Set the temperature to 22 degrees" - enables climate control, does not set temperature
"Set the temperature to 22 degrees Celsius" - same as above
"Increase temperature" - raised temperature by 1.5C
"Lower temperature" - lowered temperature by 1.5C
"Open auto pilot settings" - command not understood (example from release notes)
"Open driver settings" - interpreted as "open Android the settings" and not understood
"Show me the rear camera" - command not understood (example from release notes)
"Open the glove box" - opened the glove box
"Where is [nearby road name]?" - command not understood
"Where is Basingstoke?" - command not understood

(The last two were based on a suggestion from the pop-up card.)

If they can sort out the evidently flaky connection and have it respond to the natural commands as expected, it'd be a massive improvement. Ideally though the speech should be processed by the car, even if that's something that is implemented later on. Mobile connectivity is far spottier than dealing with e.g. an Echo device on a home broadband connection and it seems a bit silly to have to tell your car to do something from within it via an Internet service.


A good tip I read on twitter - use the terms/names for things you find in the manual https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/model_3_owners_manual_north_america_en.pdf
 
Wish I could rollback the previous version I has was lovely for every feature it provided.
Tiny amount of data, huge processing power back at the mothership and only one set of voice recognition code to maintain, is why. But yes, it does require an internet connection of sorts.

However Elon/Spacex are in the process of launching a 12,000 satellite constellation to improve reception - name one other manufacturer that is competing with that!

Alternatively as HAL9000 said

"I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this.
I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over."

Bringing better reception to the world is an awesome idea, well apart from if you are an astronomer you might get a little telescope blocked. Not sure the current cars would talk to it but on the other hand maybe as much attention to detail on 12,000 cars as satellites for defects and investment in customer services would help us a lot more. Clearly this Christmas patch was rushed and not tested. Tried the voice commands again this morning and it managed to navigate once and then understood nothing after. Lets hope for some solid improvements in 2020 as I cant complain about the added features in a handful of months no other car does that yet.
 
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... well apart from if you are an astronomer you might get a little telescope blocked...

I hear those complaints, big telescopes potentially have a much bigger issue with whole sky maps especially, what will likely happen in somebody will write some code to scrub the tracks from the images, and it will be sorted. Spacex are puportedly working on reduced reflectivity coatings for future releases to mitigate the issue.
 
Voice commands are working for me now. "Fold mirrors" I think will be most useful.
Mine were DOA earlier but will try again.
Freemont will be working today so I expect they are spinning up more cloud capacity to meet demand.
I wonder if they plan to deploy an edge NLP (natural language processing) model in the future, they would take pressure of the central cloud by running at least a subset of voice recognition locally. Would make sense as I’m often in an LTE not spot.
 
I wonder if they plan to deploy an edge NLP (natural language processing) model in the future, they would take pressure of the central cloud by running at least a subset of voice recognition locally. Would make sense as I’m often in an LTE not spot.

That'd be a pretty good idea. I'd imagine the car has sufficient processing power to handle this to some extent. I can see having it processed by some central server with lots of capacity has the advantage of being able to have a massive amount of speech data to work with but it's not ideal.

At the end of the day your car will mostly just need to be familiar with your own voice. It'd take a lot of work but given how Tesla seem to be trying to go the AI route for things, I can imagine the car using the cloud service initially and then "learning" from that to build up a local speech recognition profile and then using the cloud as a fall-back in case the car can't figure out what the user is saying.

For now though... Just need the car to not be deaf half the time and also implement the commands that are supposed to work!
 
It certainly makes you look like a bit of a dick-spring when your girlfriend’s brother is thinking of going Tesla and even saying ‘navigate home’ sits there trying to work out what to do with your command while he looks at you blankly for 60seconds and you end up just doing it on the screen with your finger.