Why is voice recognition so bad?

BrianE

I usually have voice commands turned off because they are so unreliable, but somehow the feature became active again recently, because as I was driving somewhere, my GO 6200 suddenly stopped displaying my current route (very annoying) and said "Say a command." Now I was alone in the car and there was no music playing; just the background sound of the air conditioning, so how can that equate to "Hello TomTom" or whatever the command is to initiate voice commands? If it can't even get the wake up command right, what hope is there for it to recognise name of places, etc? Very poor, for a device costing this much money. By comparison, the voice commands using the remote control for my Amazon Fire TV are spot on and that only cost a fraction of the price of my GO 6200. Similarly, My Dragon Naturally Speaking using a bluetooth headset generally gives great results.

Kiwi Brian

Hi my go to an address has never worked with voice control. They have never been able to resolve it at tom tom just say reboot. they are hopeless

Carminat

They have marketed their devices as having voice recognition for years - I imagine at least ten years? It has never worked for me - I've tried shouting, whispering, swearing, being polite and sundry combinations of the above. The solution is to waste your time on something more productive!

Baddyfinger

Me too voice control is 10 years behind other voice controlled devices......ridiculous.

big

Sure, I think TomTom can do better, but note other voice controlled devices (Siri, Alexa, Cortana etc.) all process your voice command on their servers in the cloud. The processor on the devices themselves is too limited to do much voice recognition beyond the wake-up phrase. Considering the TomTom is stand-alone, in some instances it does ok.

That said, I think it's laughable to advertise you can give it an address by voice. It doesn't even come close.

Rob Williamson

Not merely bad, but dangerous.
Mine keeps randomly turning on and never 'listens' (i.e. doesn't respond to commands - first of which should be Voice Off !!) - If I don't physically touch the screen, it re-routes me - yesterday to 300 miles out of my way!
I must find out how to disable it - I have a 6200 which is fairly top-of-the-range. If they can't do it well, they should scrap the 'feature'.

Heanster

I agree with the comments here. It has never been resolved; compared to Hey Google and Siri the voice recognition is garbage. I recently replaced my older Tomtom for a top of the range model - no different. It should be removed completely as an option it is that bad. My only other gripe is that the unit reboots two or three times a day, usually when I'm at a busy junction. Really bad if, like me, you are a multi drop driver.

BrianE

I sometimes asked my previous TomTom (GO 6200) to execute the command "3D View" and on a few occasions it set the volume setting to zero instead. Weird.