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Audi navigation: worst in industry?

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Old 05-31-2013, 09:46 PM
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Default Audi navigation: worst in industry?

Just picked up an A6 tonight and brought back a 2010 A5 I had on lease. I thought the 2010 version was horrible but this is almost as bad

Using voice command I entered very simple addresses. Here are a couple of examples: 1815 Hilltop drive, elgin IL or 5043 Fletcher street Chicago IL. They return addresses in different cities in different state. Once I got Collinsville IL. On other addresses the system said the address could not be found

What's worse is I can't even get my home address to register. The closest I can get is somewhere down the street. All addresses tried have been there for between 25 and 100 years, so this is not new construction.

Of the 5 entered only 1 worked

Last edited by Omeletpants; 05-31-2013 at 09:49 PM.
Old 05-31-2013, 11:52 PM
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Congrats on your new ride and welcome to what I affectionately call the middle child club. As for the navigation, I had the same issue when I first started using the voice commands. I found that tryin to say "enter address 123 main st any town California" doesn't work well. Try saying "enter address" then wait for the prompt that asks for street city and state. I found that my success rate went from 1 out of 5 to 4 out of 5. Other thing you may want to try:.

1. Voice training. It's a feature within the car setup that will have you say numbers in different sequences. This improve your responses.
2 . Don't over emphasize your speech. Do yell either. Speak in a normal tone and at just below normal speed.
Lastly if that doesn't work you can always use the cool touchpad if your car is so equipped but being a senior world member I, sure you already knew this stuff.
Old 06-01-2013, 05:59 AM
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If I recall the sequence, try this to save your home address exact location:
When you are at your home, press the center **** and via options, save the cross hair location to directory and edit the title to "Home". Then when you want to navigate to your home address, say "Enter destination Home address".

You can do this to save any map location to the MMI Directory; this works nicely if you want to save for later use an address that's incorrect on the map or a location not in the internal or Google database.. (Any locations you add do not copy back to your phone's contacts but will be recognized by name with MMI voice control).

Also be sure to use the exact syntax for voice control as shown in the manual. Here's a pretty comprehensive list of 3G commands (2 pages):

http://www.pbase.com/snagitseven/image/150539664
http://www.pbase.com/snagitseven/image/150539658
Old 06-01-2013, 11:11 AM
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Took the advice and went through the audio training. Didn't help. I'm lucky to get 30% success on random addresses from the personal phonebook. Audi should be embarrassed and get a real navigation system that works as well as a Nuvi, which is 90% accurate for me
Old 06-01-2013, 12:29 PM
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Originally Posted by Omeletpants
Took the advice and went through the audio training. Didn't help. I'm lucky to get 30% success on random addresses from the personal phonebook. Audi should be embarrassed and get a real navigation system that works as well as a Nuvi, which is 90% accurate for me
Seems to work fairly well for me and my fiance, each with different MY2012 A6s. 8 of out 10 times the address is picked up correctly.

The Audi 2010 3G MMI nav system was a little diff as you would have to pause in between state, city, address, and house number.

The current generation MMI nav system works best saying the entire address with out a pause.
Old 06-01-2013, 01:20 PM
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Originally Posted by dht34
Seems to work fairly well for me and my fiance, each with different MY2012 A6s. 8 of out 10 times the address is picked up correctly.
Same for me. Voice Control works accurately most of the time with address entries with few issues.
Old 06-01-2013, 03:37 PM
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Originally Posted by dht34
Seems to work fairly well for me and my fiance, each with different MY2012 A6s. 8 of out 10 times the address is picked up correctly.

The Audi 2010 3G MMI nav system was a little diff as you would have to pause in between state, city, address, and house number.

The current generation MMI nav system works best saying the entire address with out a pause.
+1

The only complain that I have the system is a bit slow. Otherwise voice recognition system is pretty good.
Old 06-01-2013, 03:49 PM
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Maybe it's me but I dont think so. Last night when the sales guy was going through systems He couldnt get the Nav system to accept more than 1 of 5 addresses, so we both kinda dismissed it

The concept is elegant and there are certainly enough features but if something doesn't even do the thing it was intended the rest means nothing.
Old 06-01-2013, 04:39 PM
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Yes, it is picky, but I have to tell you...

One of my friends at work...native English speaker as am I, but I have to tell you that I often don't know what he's saying. I just let him keep going until I catch enough content to make a guess. He considers Siri and Google Voice to be absolute failures, and his car's voice control (Lexus) constantly gets his complaints.

I use Siri constantly, as well as Dragon Dictate (for dictation into my computer/iPad), and the Audi voice systems on my last few cars. It's seldom that I have a problem. When I do, it's generally because there's someone else in the car.

I also work with a number of Chinese and Indian (not American Indian) folk, with heavy accents and strange pronunciation cues. They also think Siri doesn't work, and are amazed at how well it works for me.

I admit that I have very practiced diction. I use voice recognition often (RSI makes it difficult to type a lot), so this stuff is important to me.

It's unfortunate that everyone thinks you can speak casually, with all kinds of slurs, mispronunciations and ticks in your speech, yet have 100% recognition. Technology isn't there yet.

Spend some time practicing with it. Don't yell or speak with starts and stops. Don't mumble or run your words together. You need to sound like Walter Cronkite or an NPR newscaster. Carefully consider whether what you're saying sounds similar to other words. Determine what you're going to say before you press the VOICE button.

I know that's not what you want to hear, and it's always possible that your car has an issue, but it works incredibly well for me. Note that I dictate many of my posts on this forum too.
Old 06-01-2013, 04:41 PM
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I feel your pain but it gets better with time. The more I used the Nav the better it got. It's even surprised me a few times when using the online destinations. I do have another complaint about the Nav system, the routing engine. By far one of the worst I've ever used. Not that it's horrible but by comparison it could use some improvement. I don't expect it to be as good as my iPhones Nav but at least as good as a $80 Tom Tom, Garmin or Magellan. Far to often it directs me to do to out of my way to get to my destination or have me do a crazy maneuver or worst have me driving down the back streets right next to a perfectly good freeway. Just my $0.02


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