Support for voice commands is essential to the Android Auto experience, allowing users to interact with apps without taking their eyes off the road.
Photo: Bogdan Popa/autoevolution/Google
Google Assistant is responsible for voice commands, but many Android Auto users have a hard time learning it, and the experience is far from reliable. Voice command integration fails regularly, sometimes without the user moving a single finger.
This is often caused by an update received by the Google app (responsible for Google Assistant integration on Android and Android Auto), and is currently also happening to some users trying to operate the app hands-free. It seems there are.
Even though the Android Auto screen correctly reproduces voice commands by typing them into the text input box, Google Assistant cannot understand what you are saying. This means that Google Assistant can understand what you say, but it can’t process your commands and will eventually return an error saying, “Sorry, we didn’t understand.”
Users who have encountered this issue claim that Google Assistant works properly even when a mobile device is not connected to the head unit to run Android Auto. As a result, everything seems to be a problem specific to his Android Auto, explaining that users have to rely on touch input for everything, making the app completely useless.
Using touch to interact with the screen is an absolute no-no for drivers. This method of interaction requires the user to take their eyes off the road, and depending on what the user wants to do (such as changing a song on Spotify), this process can take up to a few seconds. Therefore, broken voice command support is a major issue that can make the application dangerous to use.
The common workarounds available in the Android Auto world don’t seem to provide any improvement. Clearing the cache and deleting Android Auto and Google app data did not resolve the issue, and Google Assistant still cannot process voice commands. It’s unclear whether downgrading to a previous build of Google apps will restore expected functionality.
This problem doesn’t seem to be limited to any particular phone or car brand. We’ve seen bug reports from Samsung and Google phone owners of various car models, but the only common denominator is Android Auto and Google apps.
The latest version of Android Auto as of this writing is 10.6, which is currently available to users through the Google Play Store. Updating to this new release does not fix any voice command bugs. This may indicate that Google needs to provide a patch to the Google app. The new Android Auto beta build should receive the green light next week, so it won’t be long until we find out who is responsible for the new voice command failure.
