I'm interested in knowing your opinions on the accuracy of the Voice Recognition in your Acura. "Accuracy" is defined as the system understanding you and performing the function you ask it to perform.

I'm of the opinion the Acura system is as good as any on the market, if not the best, but maybe mine just works better than average. So please weigh in with your opinions.

Thanks!

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Mike asked for permission to post this in the main forum to solicit replies and I am allowing it. Good question to ask!

I voted 100% as for the functions I most frequently use (phone functions) the system is very accurate.

 

I give it 75%. But most of my errors come from not knowing the specific phrases the car recognizes. I have turned off the radio or the AC, not intentionally, more times than I care to admit.

 

Hahaha ... I think we've all done that. In fact, that's why I didn't have a total 100% category. There's always an instance where we stumble on a word or phrase, or maybe the road noise is too loud or something, and it misses a command.

But I'll take your 75%.

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I also answered cloe to 100%, the only time it doesn't understand me is if my kids are talking in the back seat, or if I don't speak clearly enough or don't use the right command.

 

If I knew the correct "keywords" the system would be very accurate. I am still hoping for a system that recognizes conversational english.

 

I thought you might be interested in seeing the results of the same poll on the ClubLexus LS460 site, with a similar number of replies.

(To be fair, I DID give the 100% option a little less "wiggle room", and that may have influenced a couple of voters. Hard to say. When I did the RL poll, I acknowledged that 100% was not a reasonable response.)

In any case, it's clear to me from this poll and from comments on CL that the Lexus Voice Recognition is a lot less accurate than ours.

Here's the two polls:




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Whenever mine doesn't work it's usually for a good reason. A) I misspoke the phrase, or B) background/road noise.

I wish it could get better at filtering out background noise. It's hard to get everyone to shutup for a second when you have people in the car talking

 

I would answer 100%, but....
I never use the voice commands for the stereo functions (changing stations, switching CD's etc) as I know that it never works on the first try (for me anyway).

If I did vote, it would be 100% for nav and climate control, maybe 5-15% for stereo functions.

So does that qualify as "100% almost always understands me"?

 

It's not even key words, its key sounds...
Hit the voice command button and say "man need pee" and watch what happens to your climate control. And yeah, I know I have the sense of humor of a forth grader

 

Once I stopped trying to e-n-u-n-c-i-a-t-e in an over-loud voice, the system starting working just fine. Now I'm like others here and confuse it because I don't know the lingo but I can't blame that on recognition.

 

Having moved to a different state, I can't tell you how valuable the "find nearest...." has been.

Find nearest auto parts store
Find nearest fast food
find nearest post office

It's been invaluable.

 

I too don't use it for everything - it's quicker to play with the big knob than it is to speak out letters.

With that said I would give it "100%". I blame me (groggy voice during early morning, late evening) rather than the system.

I just wish I could dial phone numbers manually and/or it could import my phone book.

 

I think you're right. This system is the best on the market. Anytime I have a customer complaining that the system isn't working right, it's ALWAYS (100% of the time) because they aren't saying the correct things.

 

Find nearest.....

Yep, one of the best things about the nav system. I use it more then finding specific addresses

 

Just curious, Lindros - I don't ever need to speak letters ... it usually knows the whole word (like street name, city name or whatever), or it offers me a list of similar names to pick from. In fact, I can't recall ever having to speak letters.

When does that happen?

BTW, I find it DOES handle numbers flawlessly - you can just speak out a string of numbers (street numbers, phone numbers, etc.) and it virtually always gets 'em.

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Wow! With 33 votes in, 85% of us rate it in the 75-100% range. That's awesome!

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I do think we have the best voice recognition system on the market, BUT I don't think the technology is quite where it needs to be yet. Same thing with my HFML- Bluetooth- it works well usually, but it does screw up quite a bit. I rate it 75% with some caveats. I'm very surprised how many people rate it 100%.

 

i'm happy with it EXCEPT when I ask phone to dial one of my saved numbers: name is 'voicemail fremont': about half the time: it dials 4039. 'voicemail hbs' always works. when I tired to save as 'hbs voicemail', it told me it could be confused with the number 4. for nav it almost 100 % for saying addresses.

 

I voted 75% it usually works for me. I use it for many things like, when i am listening to an mp3 cd and i am on track 97 its easy to say "cd play track 2". I think one of the best features is saying a street name and having it find it. I just gotta read that book and figure out all the phrases.

 

I'm not. For me, the system only messes up if I don't know the right term, if the moonroof is open, if I take too long to say something (like when I forget a phone number), or if there's too much noise.

 

I rated it at 75%. It hardly ever recongnizes the number "3" for me. It always wants to dial an "8"!!! Go figure! Also, I think it hangs on waiting for additional text/speech too long - for example, when I am done saying a number or asking for "nearest italian restaurant", if I cough a few seconds later it tries to interpret that into words or some funky numbers. It s actually pretty funny when it tries to find or dial $%#^&. I kid you not when I tell you that's what it thought I said (not a bad word but the signs just in case some were wondering... ). Overall an impressive system.

Later,

 

Just for comparison purposes, here's the latest results of the same poll on the Lexus LS460 forum:



They're developing a nice bell curve, but it's still centered on 50%, and is slightly biased toward the lower end.

I think it's not only important to know how WE feel about ours, but also to know how green the grass is on the other side of the fence ...

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Voice recognition is almost flawless for me. Not true when I first started to use the system. I tried to speak too clear: pausing between each number instead of stringing out the numbers. Amazing to me how accurate it is for any voice. The system does not really learn a particular voice since there is no learning mode. Would it be more accurate to call this a sound recognition system?

Mike_tx:
You have to input or speak letters when navigating by POI then the name of the business.

 

You're right. I just usually "spin the wheel" and enter a few letters and then push it up to "List". More often I just go by "category" and pick from the list.

But you are correct.

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I think that would be a major improvment on the Nav if we were able to speak names of POIs and then list. If the system is able to recognize the names of thousands of streets, then surely it could have recognized in Santa Cruz Ca the restaurant Shoguns.

I wish the nav was able to list fast food restaurants only in the direction of travel. Example if you are southbound on the highway it doesn't do much good to list a restaurant 1 mile back. I find myself having to repeat the find nearest fast food command every couple of miles. Of course these are picky gripes since most nav system can't come close to the Acura Nav system.

 

Well i believe you can have the Nav find POI's along the route you are travelling. So that should be the same thing. I too hate when it searchs for POI's that are in a different direction than i am going but i found this feature yesterday and it was alot easier.

 

Nobody hates the navi? C'mon, there's gotta be one.

I looked at Mike's thread on CL and there's no comparison. It appears we are pretty satisfied with our system, and they are most definitely not.

 

I'm sure there are folks who hate the nav, but they probably didn't spend the money on it and therefore can't make a valid assesment of the voice recognition accuracy.

 

I've personally owned Infiniti's, Lexuses, Acuras and Garmin standalone units, and there's no question the Acura system is the best - both in VR and Nav functionality.

I'm looking pretty hard at an LS460 right now, and as silly as some people think it is, the Nav system is a HUGE hangup for me. Yes, I would actually turn down a car because of its Nav system. Fortunately for this one, there is a mickey mouse workaround that I can probably live with, but if I do this, I know I'll always wish I had the Acura system back.

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When it comes to navigation and in-car functions, the recognition works really well for the most part. One recent problem I encountered was trying to find "Walnut Ave". It listed a ton of names including "Kumkwat" which I don't think is close. The hands free phone link, on the other hand, is a crap shoot. Particular for some names. i.e. I programmed "Sarah" using my voice into the phone book, but it always wants to dial "Zero". I have to enunciate or say it slow to get it the second time.

 

I have an 08 TL-S, had it about 2 months now. I find the voice recognition to be outstanding, particularly in comparison with my previous car, an 06 Lincoln LS. It was hard to get that car to recognize much that I said, the TL-S is much better.

I agree that the navi system works better than the hands free phone. I suspect, having recently worked on speech recognition on a project at work using Nuance s/w, that it's because the nav system has robust grammars developed for it, as they knew what it would be listening for as they control the commands recognized. The fact that most commands are more than word gives more for the system to work with, if it recognizes two of the words out of three it has a better chance of guessing the other. With the phone, you are assigning your own phrases/words, which are undoubtedly stored as wave patterns or phonyms, and the system really doesn't know what you're saying as in the case of a preprogrammed phrase. Fairly often the phone will miscue on me into numbers, and there were a lot of names it didn't like and wanted changed when I programmed it.

I find that, just like with the system we developed at work, speaking normally and not trying to overly inflect the words or in particular speak very slowly, makes it work better. Speak clearly, but normally and at a normal speed, and it works much better.

My coworker who is the Nuance/speech recognition programmer has consistently been impressed with the performance of the Acura system. We were going out and I wanted to check traffic, and did the "Display Traffic Incidents" command, and when it came back he commented "Wow, that returned really fast!" It's nice to see such a good implementation, the electronics integration on the car is first rate.

 

Had the same problem Roy! However, since I've gotten the new DVD (ver 4.62) my system has worked flawlessly. Have any others noticed this improvement in the RL's voice recognition capability?

 

I switched from my RSX to the RL and RDX for two main reasons.....AWD and Nav.

I voted 75%, but I think it's more my fault, as I just can't get used to saying "O" instead of "zero" for phone numbers.(It's an A/C radio thing)

 

I'm the same way. The bar is set very high for any future car I'm considering, especially if it's a non-Acura. I could definitely see the NAV being a deciding factor.

 

Having owned the car for almost 3 years now, we've pretty much tackled all the nuances with the system and have our own daily use subset of commands. With that, I can safely say that the car gets the commands 100% right all the time.