Garmin Voice-Activated Feature

I assume you mean the capability to command the GPS?

If so it has a long way to go from being perfect. I have a 855 and 3790 both having this feature and I am inclined to say the 855 is better. In the 855 you have a small button on the steering wheel to activate it.

I also find it does not recognize the word and you have to repeat it several times. It also does not work very well if there are any extraneous noises i.e radio, windows open etc.

The 3790 just listens and frequently out of the blue something on the radio sets it off and I get an unwanted "Speak a command". This also completely blocks the screen with non map information and could be important if you are in a situation where you really need to see the map.

Regardless in my opinion it is not worth buying a GPS for that feature.

I have a 3490 and to say the least it's persnickety if and when it will recognize your voice prompts. I too have had the radio, and seat belt dings, or turn signal clicker trigger the Speak a Command prompt.

Noise from an open window is frequently a problem as it won't recognize your voice commands.

I have played around with positioning the device at several locations in the car and have found (at least for me) the unit works best when positioned in the far left hand corner of the wind screen although your results may be different.

When the unit is in the far left hand corner, I speak against the drivers window and the unit sometimes responds and sometimes it dosent. It's not a feature I would bet my life on and it's at times a pain in the tail.

Hope this helps.

When needed, especial in traffic.

It's a crapshoot. My 885 gets used frequently in voice command mode, primarily when I'm on the highway. But then I mute all other sounds in the car and often end up using the touch screen in frustration.

I just got a 2797LMT with voice command, the latest version of this tool and it rocks! I love it. Voice recognition is never perfect (i.e. ice cream vs. I scream sounds the same to a computer) but hey it is better than poking at the screen. It's a must have for me for any future Garmin. Definitely recommend it.

I have a Nuvi 2595 right in my hand.

All of the complaints apply. It probably won't understand you if your car windows are down, or if the radio is playing, and may randomly go to the voice command screen of its own accord.

In addition, the _only_ non navigational commands it can perform are brightness and volume.

Commands it recognizes are: View Map, Find Place, Find Category, Find Intersection, Recently Found, Go Home, Find Address, Find City, Detour, and Stop Route.

Note that our Custom POIs are not on that list.

And to add insult to injury, even with a search list feature that the user is able to customize, you can't put Custom POIs into it either, because - well I don't know why the hell not.

More bad news is that this new fangled gizmo takes _six_ taps to get you to the Custom POI menu, versus my old Nuvi 750, which requires four to achieve same.

This must be what they call progress- and thus, I am one disappointed camper.

Geo/ATL

I have an 855 which I used for a couple years, and a 3790LMT with about a year on it. Both have Garmin voice recognition, with strengths and weaknesses, but wildly different.

The 855 offers broader control of the unit while navigating (zoom and such). Activation means pushing the supplied button you probably attached to a stalk on the steering wheel. That activation always works, but I never troubled to pack it for an air trip. Using it for address entry works, but is greatly impaired by the very poor likelihood it will guess what street name you have spoken. The numerical part of addresses it gets well-nigh perfectly--especially if you pronounce the full number and not individual digits ("two thousand three hundred twenty-five" seems more likely to get recognized correctly than "two three two five". But in the end I settled down to hardly ever using it.

The 3790 LMT wake-up phrase is configurable. It also coaches you a little on whether your choice is likely to work well. I use "Listen up, George" and it hears me about 95% of the time, and turns on without request perhaps once in thirty hours of use. So to my taste it has the advantage on activation over the 855.

As mentioned, the 3790 is very modal about voice command--on getting the unit into voice mode you have just one screen worth of options. Some (such as search type commands) go down layers from the start, but there are only a few things you can start. This is simple, and is better at exposing all your choices (I never did learn all the accepted voice commands on the 855).

Actual matching of names to text works MUCH better for me on the 3790LMT than on the 855, especially for street names. It asks you the city or ZIP code first, and I think it restricts itself to possible matches included in the map set for that location. Unless it is very sure of a match, it shows you a screen of possible matches. More than 95% of the time, the actual name I want appears on the first screen of offered choices, and selecting the right one is simply a matter of speaking the line number. For me, it only skips the step of presenting choices about 10% of the time--but in those cases it has not yet been wrong.

In fact, address entry is so good that I pretty often use it in preference to manual screen entry even when I am sitting in my garage. Sadly, it would be much faster save for some interface design choices which slow the process. In particular, it speaks the recognized number to you very slowly, one digit at a time--then asks whether it is a match. Only after the "busy/listening" symbol in the top right goes green can you say "yes", all of which greatly slows what would otherwise be a nice fast transaction. There are a couple of other places to which I object similarly.

While voice entry might help avoid unwelcome attention in jurisdictions attempting to ban screen touching while driving, I doubt it is a real safety advantage. Too much share of mind is needed to operate it, and keep track of whether it has heard you.

Others have mentioned the importance of distraction sounds. You should assume it won't work for you if you have the radio turned on, or passengers speaking, and at freeway speeds even wind noise or road noise may be a problem.

I've used Dragon voice entry on desktop PCs for well over a decades. By comparison the GPS application has a serious limitation in lacking a scheme for consistently placing the microphone in a location near the speaker's mouth, and brings vastly less compute power to the problem. It is no wonder that the Garmin units are far less able to "hear" completely random words correctly. Fortunately, where a command or a number is expected, the choice is not random from a dictionary of hundreds of thousands of words, but just a best-match among at most a few dozen choices.

This is an excellent point and one that is not often mentioned. I have found on my 855 that the concentration required to speak the correct commands and observe the screen and voice prompts to determine if the spoken command was interpreted correctly is more distracting than a quick glance and touch of the screen. It is probably a personal thing, but I have not found the speech recognition to be less distracting than the touch interface.

Yes, some distraction, but used on a limited basis, it will save an accident. If I have a list of "recently found" locations and wish to go to one, all I do is say Reecently Found and then state the line number, possibly saying "down" to scan the list. Local eat spots or fuel...easy voice commands, as long as you cut out the ambient sounds. No, voice command is certainly not all it is cut out to be but it has it's purposes. Sure beats hunt and peck. martin

Until I am talking on the phone and something I said triggers it to go off.

I agree with you that that sort of discipline can really help make use while in motion safer than otherwise, but I think the big safety improvement comes from the discipline, and less related to the voice entry. Pre-populating the recently found list by entering my likely destinations while I'm sitting calmly at my desk or in my garage is one of my favorite trip preparation techniques, especially when I'm packing the GPS on an airplane for use in a rental car in a distant city.

Got a 2797 primarily for the 7" screen not VC. For me it comes under heading of "amusing, but not essential". I figure it works approx 60% of time especially if there is no background road noise. Since that is almost impossible with my Subaru, I rarely use it on the move. I do notice it comes on onccasionally all of a sudden for no apparent reason. Yesterday it triggered while I was blasting "HMS Pinafore" on the car stereo; since I never changed the activation phraseI guess it might have heard "voice" or "command" as lyrics. I will try it with "The Mikado" next and see what happens.

My nuvi 2595 is Voice Activated and I just Love it too much. Recently, while Driving in Good Ole California, with all their Corn Fed Laws, I had to make an Important Phone call and since it is against their Laws to Plug a Mobile (Cell) Phone in your Ear and Drive, I simply called out to Junior (you can Customize any Name) and told him "Phone" then I told him "Phone Directory (Book) and told him a Name and it came on the Screen and I said "Call" I made my Phone call w/o even having to Touch the Device. I understand that California is getting ready to make it against the Law to even use Bluetooth, in the very near Future.

It's often stated California is the land of fruits and nuts and those that aren't are flakes. It appears there are many people in Sacramento that feel they are the only ones capable of making rational choices and decisions. The true issue isn't the technology, it's the culture of those employing the technology. A ban on using Bluetooth connections to a phone would be impossible to enforce even on a secondary level as the connection isn't necessarily because a conservation was occurring. How would a streaming audio connection be determined and would that be different? They both involve a connection through a wireless device to a cellular network. Then you have those connections through a cell phone providing other services such as common with Ford's SYNC system. It appears as if this is being proposed by one of the flakes or a certified nut.

I have a 2595LMT and have quit using the voice activation feature. It often doesn't hear me or doesn't understand me and gives me the wrong information. It will occasionally react to some random noise and ask me to "say a command". I can live without it.

Well Stated Box Car

Spullis, I believe (no way of Proving it) that the Device must Learn Our Unique Voice Patterns. I have noticed that after using the Voice Commands for a while, the Device seems to React better

My 3490 recognizes my commands about half the time. I have it in the fron left in the corner of the windshield.

I barely use my Nuvi 3490 voice features. Most the time it won't recognize my voice correctly.

I have an 855 and use the voice commands when in traffic, it beats trying to use the touch screen under those conditions. Sometimes I think it responds better to certain voices, a couple of times it responded to the same command from my wife that it didn't understand from me. Maybe because of the higher pitched voice?