To me the voice system in Tesla is one of the hidden gems of the car.
The only "limitation" is that, like Siri, it will not work well (or at all) without internet connection.
Allow me to promote it a bit...
Listening to music:
- The command
Play, can be followed by a song title, artist name, podcast name, mix of title and artist, genre of music. Eg
Play Where the streets have no names Pet Shop Boys.
Note 1: It will never start the song directly but instead fill-in the search of the media player and display the results. Up to you to pick the one you looked for.
Note 2: You noticed I did not add "from" in the command, between the title and the group's name. It's because it would fail: the Play command sends all the words after it to the search function of the media player, and would add "from". As this is not part of an artist name or song, it would not return the expected result.
Note 3: The Play commands makes a search in a kind of music related only database imo. It tries and often matches existing songs or artist quite efficiently. Impressive
Finding a place
I very much like this one to check on opening hours of places:
-
Where is, followed by the place name, and optionally a specific town/city. Eg
Where is MacDonald's in Chester's Mill
Searching for restaurants or any type of place
-
Drive to restaurants: This will list all restaurants around you
-
Drive to restaurants in Chester's Mill: This will propose all restaurants in Chester's Mill
Off topic, but I cannot resist to tell something not everyone knows: when the navigation returns a list of places, you can indeed touch the name of the place and that triggers the navigation. I guess you knew that

. But you can touch the "POI symbol", at the right end of each place in the list, and that will just focus the map on that place and open the detail bubble for that place (opening hours, ...).
Use case: you are looking for a restaurant open on monday (restaurants are often closed on monday's around here): "Drive to restaurants near <town>" will list restaurants and then by touching in turn each "POI symbol", I can check whether they are open or not.
Start Navigation
-
Drive to XYZ, where XYZ can be anything that a google search can find: name of a place or business. You can add details to narrow down which specific place you want:
Drive to tennis club in Walnut Grove
If you have Favorites saved in the navigation, you can also use that name to designate your destination. Say you have "Grand Ma" saved, just ask
Drive to Grand Ma
If you defined your home and work, you can ask to
drive to home or
to work
Another hidden gem: instead of using voice, to drive home or to office: on the screen, just drag down (or right), the "Navigate" Button. That will trigger the navigation to work if you're home in the morning, and to home if you are away from home. So easy
Cancel:
Cancel Navigation
Also for the non english native speakers, it is multilingual and is able to recognised mixed languages. I have it set up in French. So that means I need to use the french commands (
Ecouter, Aller à, Où se trouve...). But for songs, as I listen also to english music, I can say in french the command, and then in english the artist's name or song title.
Voice in the Tesla is imho just plain brilliant.
What I miss
My contacts have often details of their address. Although you can open the contacts list, and touch their address to navigate, I'd very much like to be able to ask "Drive to Tom's" or in french: Aller à la maison de Tom
What Tesla can improve
In french, the translation is not ideal to call someone. It's the infinitive form of the verb, so not how you would speak naturally.
So it is like if for english, you'd have to say "To Call Jack" instead of "Call Jack".
Request to moderators (
@bmah): the subject of voice commands is a recurring topic and imo well worth promoting. Could we have a topics in the Sticky of the User Interface? (One share across all models ?)