Comment by karlgkk
15 days ago
> As someone who got into a rollover accident which ended with my car upside down on a freeway, hearing only the onstar person talking to me while half conscious, this is sad.
My phone does this now. Most phones do it now.
Maybe in theory, but I trust Apple to detect a crash correctly about as far as I can throw my iPhone without breaking its glass back or front.
This is the company whose flagship voice assistant, in 2026, can’t tell the intended recipient in a sentence like “Text Bob Mary signed the deal.” And if my phone happens to be thrown into the back of the car by the crash, I doubt anyone will be able to hear me.
Not to mention that OnStar has operators who talk to first responders. the cell phone thing will just call 911 and hope for the best.
I pay for OnStar, and think it’s worth it.
> This is the company whose flagship voice assistant, in 2026, can’t tell the intended recipient in a sentence like “Text Bob Mary signed the deal.” And if my phone happens to be thrown into the back of the car by the crash, I doubt anyone will be able to hear me.
You can be using CarPlay to navigate at that moment to a destination, and because of the way my fiancee has Siri set up, if she says "Get me directions to the nearest Starbucks", Siri will say, "I'm sorry, I don't know where you are."
Lol, same thing for Android, too. It has full access to my contact list, but if I tell it to "Call Stephan Beier" I see the transcript for "Beyer" and then it fails. That sounds the same in German, now what shall I do. Stupid thing.
Other "it's the future year 2026 how the hell are things still this bad" examples:
1. For years "Navigate Home" has done exactly what you'd expect, then one morning it decides traveling to Home Depot is the only possible interpretation.
2. A bog-standard timed alarm goes off, and half the time "Silence Alarm" leads to it insisting that there are no alarms going off right now.
What stings is that these aren't issues with ambiguous grammar or unusual phrasings, these are extremely predictable commands for features I would expect in the minimum viable product.
When they forced us to use Gemini as the assistant, saying "hey Google call X" stopped working because it came up with a list of phone numbers for them and I couldn't tell it "home" or "mobile" because I had to manually select.
That lasted about 6 hours before I figured out how to switch back to Assistant.
Why do you trust the car companies more? The premise of this discussion is that they cannot be trusted to act in the user's interest.
Why? Well, The OnStar product has about a 30-year history of doing its main jobs flawlessly. Also, it's a paid product and their flagship product. We exchange our dollars for the product they provide. Simple. Unlike Apple where these are ancillary offerings way outside their core competency.
And I'm OnStar have great margins, because it's basically an insurance product that most customers rarely if ever use. But it's an interesting insurance product because unlike say, car insurance, instead of a claim costing them $10,000-1,000,000 a "claim" costs them maybe 30 minutes of a call center agent's time. Great business to be in.
But all that works in my favor. It's a good deal for me because it might save the life of me or someone I love and I can easily afford it. And they have every incentive to preserve their reputation, such as by not replacing the operator with a chatbot who wants to offer me directions to the nearest Chevron™ when I've rolled off the road into a canyon.
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Considering the problem space, and comparing your speech recognition to what cars have, I think you’ll find your onstar system is worse in every way
So for all of the reasons you stated, I’ve strongly come to the opposite conclusion
sorry, I didn't find someone named "bob mary" in your contacts list
Yup! Or it starts a group text with Bob AND Mary saying “signed the deal”
"I found this on the web. Check it out."
My phone does this now. Most phones do it now.
Only if it hasn't been crushed, damaged, or otherwise flung out of the vehicle that crashed so violently that it's actually upside down, as noted in the original comment.
The same is true of the cell phone hardware built into the vehicle that is crashed and upside down.
Stress test your mounts!