voice control

[canalmike]

I had it on my previous Audi. I found it great for entering a new destination into the Nav while on the move. Easy to use and effective.

I negotiated it as a dealer-activated extra (they said they normally charge £150 as opposed to the £200 factory-option).

However on the Golf it's far from as good as the Audi version (surprising as they're both VAG). Often does not recognise my input ("please speak more softly"; "please speak more loudly"; Sorry, I don't recognise 'Oxford'  "  etc!) and I have a pretty clear speaking voice.

I'm getting to know how to make it understand, and do find it useful, but it's not good enough to be worth paying for it.......

[BlinGTIes]

I have an iPhone and when it’s hooked up to CarPlay you can activate Siri by holding the voice button down for a few seconds. It works ok, I’ve only used it for directions whilst driving but does mean you have to use apple maps

[nigeldodd]

Interesting to learn that Siri or Google Assistant can be activated with a long press.

It might be worth noting that Google phones home to get its supercomputers to do the actual speech recognition, so you will need a data connection. Presumably the native speech recognition software is built in to the Golf media centre and since this requires quite a bit of processing power (less these days with more sophisticated algorithms but still quite a demand) it might be slow and inaccurate. Good microphones are important but I think there is only one built into the Golf (?) so it can't triangulate and eliminate noise.

Ideally, like the new speaker pods sold by Google, Amazon, Apple, robust speech recognition in a noisy environment needs to be built-in from the ground up with multiple microphones and good pre-processing.

It would be a good security feature if this were built in to a car since the vocal tract is unique, like a fingerprint.