A4Driver

My niece from San Francisco was in town to attend a high school reunion, so I decided to take her out to dinner last night. I picked her up at a friend's house where she was staying. After a little discussion, we decided to go to a restaurant called Fitzwilly's.

I wrote the restaurant's name into Navigation interface, and was surprised to see a map of the whole United States come up. Without giving it much thought, I just zoomed into where we were on the map, and started driving.

After about five minutes of driving, I noticed that the map said we had 615 miles to go, and would reach our destination by 6:35 a.m. What? Obviously, the Navigation wasn't sending us to the local restaurant. Well, I remembered the name of a landmark nearby, and entered it into the Navigation. We arrived at our destination within 10 minutes.

What makes this particularly strange is that Fitzwilly's has been in that location for more than 30 years, and just a week earlier I had downloaded and installed the updated 2018-19 maps. Btw, earlier my niece had given me the address of where to pick her up at her friend's house. But when I entered it into the Navigation, it did not show up. So I plugged my phone into the car to use Waze, and had no problem finding the address.
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SCarGuy

when you enter a business, etc name, it will populate suggestions it thinks you mean. These may be the closest, but not necessarily. If you select in the Nav to filter things to just your state, the results will be more relevant. Can't speak to the update, as I didn't bother to do it on my car

justbreddy

Sounds like they are imitating Apple Maps!

A4Driver

The funny thing is, only one entry showed up in the Navigation results, and it was out of state. Btw, if I set the Nav to filter places in just my state, and I travel to another state, if I do a search when I'm in the other state will it show me places in that state or in my home state only? In other words, if I'm in another state and do a search for "Home Depot," will it show me Home Depots nearby or only the ones in my home state?
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SCarGuy

Filtering per state gives you only results for that state.

When you searched did you do it by restaurant name, or address? Just curious

A4Driver

Do you mean it will only give results for the state you have picked, or the state you happen to be in at the time?

I searched by the restaurant's name. If I had known the address, it probably would have given me a different result, but I didn't know it.
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superswiss

The offline POI database is largely useless and I don't see any efforts to making it more accurate and complete. Not an Audi only thing. With everything going connected, maintaining an offline POI database has no future. A simple voice command such as Google Search "Fitzwilly's" would have gotten you there right away, but obviously that requires an active Audi connect subscription. As for your friend's address, not sure why it didn't find it. Personally, I rarely enter an address into the system directly. I just send it to the car from my phone or use Google search as above. We can argue the cost of Audi connect, but even a smartphone doesn't work very well without an active Internet subscription.

Audi could do a better job at making these interactions more seamless. If you type a POI into the system it doesn't automatically do an online search. Only if it doesn't find a match in the local database does it give the option to do a Google Search. It's all a bit clunky as much as I hate to admit it and I'm finding that Audi is falling behind on multiple fronts these days to the point where I'm strongly considering abandoning the brand. Just watched this video the other day of the new Mercedes A-class. Take a look at their cabin tech. First production car with augmented reality navigation and natural voice interaction with the car's AI. Pretty awesome.

A4Driver

I do have an active Audi Connect subscription. But I find that the voice recognition is not always accurate, responding with a different street/landmark/business name, despite my using crystal-clear enunciation.
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superswiss

That's surprising as when you do a Google Local Voice search, the voice recognition of the search term is handled by Google, not the MMI. However, you can also perform a Google/Online search by typing in the search term. How to do that should be described in the owner's manual. Or alternatively, you can use the MMI connect app for your phone, lookup the place on the phone and then send it to the car.

SCarGuy

Did you go through the Speech Recognition section of the MMI? I use voice search/commands in my car all the time, and found it works extremely well.