Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Voice Recognition (for British accent)

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
When you guys start getting your Model S's, I'd be super interested in how the voice recognition works for you, i.e. is there an UK/English setting. As a Brit in the US, I have to do my very best (i.e. worst) American accent to get it to understand me, and even then it's hit and miss. Obviously there's loads of accents in the UK, so what works in London probably won't work out so well up north, but it'll be interesting to see.

As an aside, I've been watching the various news articles on the S launch in the UK, very exciting for you guys! My commute used to be Colchester to Heathrow almost every day, I'd have saved a tonne of money if the Model S had existed back then.
 
Can't help with the accent training as most of them there Yankee friends I know think I'm from Oz even though I'm a Brit of Scottish decent ;-)

But I have to say - that UK commute must be what drove you abroad. I mean, 200 miles a day round the two worst most jammed up roads in the the UK? ... what were you thinking ?!?!

Thats 50,000 miles year, probably about £15,000 in fuel at massively taxed UK prices.

Or £0.8k in electricity and a very expensive holiday for free instead.
 
Can't help with the accent training as most of them there Yankee friends I know think I'm from Oz even though I'm a Brit of Scottish decent ;-)

But I have to say - that UK commute must be what drove you abroad. I mean, 200 miles a day round the two worst most jammed up roads in the the UK? ... what were you thinking ?!?!

Thats 50,000 miles year, probably about £15,000 in fuel at massively taxed UK prices.

Or £0.8k in electricity and a very expensive holiday for free instead.

It was no fun. I had a fuel card, and the fact I was in a car for ~5-6hrs per day justified (in my head at least) a decent car, but I don't miss it. And you're right, I was averaging around 45k miles a year. As long as I left home before 5, and the office after 7, I could do the trip in a totally law-breaking hour and a half, my PB (personal best) was 1hr 14m ;-)
 
Lol, I thought dropping into a dialect would do that :) "tha'll be reet" = You will be OK my good chap!

If the car talks to a central server to work out the language it seems pretty good, Google seem to do this on my phone and is very accurate. Land Rover however... I have one person in my entire voice phone book, can I get the car to place a call without 30 mins of trying every single voice I can try? It is really frustrating as it should just be a pattern match against my voice recording of my wife's name with some degree of variation. It simply does not work and it's much quicker to just press a button on my phone or on the car's touch screen (if it's bothered syncing my contacts).
 
Song titles are doing OK for me, but place names are more problematic. I have family who live in Aldeburgh, Suffolk and no pronounciation I can come up with gets the car to guess anything like the right answer.
 
Asking for music (specifying artist and track) is pretty good I find (though with the kids in the car it's pretty much always "Play Let It Go by Idina Menzel" which disappointingly is always 100% accurately recognised).

Entering nav destinations is hit and miss at the best of times and completely useless if you're travelling at speed with increased background noise.

I'm not sure the problem is necessarily inherent with the software though; it seems more that the dictionary the system is using isn't nav specific and certainly is not UK specific. Entering postcodes ("Navigate to Dee Ayy One Two Bee Dee") just generates complete gibberish - even my 8 year old Audi's voice recognition can do basic letters and numbers reliably. Asking for "Kwik Fit Dartford" generated "Kwik Fit Darling" and "Chapter One Restaurant Bromley" generated "Chapter One Restaurant Probably". Darling and Probably are very unlikely words to to see in a nav destination whereas Bromley and Dartford are both pretty likely given that the car lives 10 miles from each.
 
Sounds similar to my experience.

But the nav search in general seems to be sub-optimal even if you don't use voice and enter things directly. For example, I picked an address from my phone contacts which the car had uploaded: this had a full street address including the postcode. The car offered me all sorts of places based on words in the street names but none of them were anywhere near; editing the text box to delete everything apart from the postcode made it find the location precisely. Evidently it ignored the postcode entirely in the initial search.