[powerbroker]

I have been driving two Teslas over the last few years. I find that their voice recognition to be roughly 75-85% accurate. More important, the manuals for the cars have not correctly described operation of voice commands for over a year. This speaks volumes to the software culture at Tesla. If you can't make the code conform to the documentation, you really can't trust the code.

[CrazyStat]

I've had my Model X for almost three years now. I find the voice control to be almost completely unusable. Seems to be something about my voice, though I have a fairly typical American accent so I'm not sure what. I demonstrated the issue to a technician when I took it in for unrelated service, thinking it might be a faulty microphone, but it worked fine for him.

Definitely one of the most disappointing features of the car, which I generally love driving.

[ericd]

Oof sorry, sounds like they should add your voice to the training dataset.

[ericd]

True, discoverability via docs needs work. But looks like lots of users have picked up the slack there.

[powerbroker]

Nothing that the users do will correct a company culture that actually has the wrong way to operate the car described in its manuals. This is the kind of communication that pervades the company, top to bottom. I don't know if they fail to understand how their cars work, or if they deliberately exaggerate.

[ericd]

Ah I thought that you meant the commands weren’t listed. What are they incorrectly describing? I’ve seen some other examples of this (notably, the getting started tutorials mention getting to the manual via a Tesla T at the top of the touchscreen, which has gone missing).

[powerbroker]

Model X Owners Manual October 2020 (2020.44) manual, page 53 -- and the corresponding page in the Model S Owners Manual. Tesla changed the operation of their voice command button around December of 2019. The manual describes two ways to signal a complete command has been vocalized -- but only one truly works. Since the 'update notes' are extremely sparse, there was never a hint in the car's instrument cluster explanation of the update, that Tesla had removed the protocol for invoking the voice commands.

If Tesla will 'forget' to tell you that a feature is removed, or changed, then expect similar behavior around edge conditions for FSD if it ever materializes. For example, a number of different protocols could be added, tried, removed revolving around contention at 4-way stop signs. If the update notes are silent on FSD adopted behavior, a lot of annoyance and potential hazards will be created.