Voice command software in vehicles has gotten much better over the years. It's pretty much on a par with Siri at this point.
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2024 Ford Mustang Drops AM Radio From Infotainment
- Thread starter davideduardo
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Keep this in mind!
In urban areas, many cells are located on the roof of apartments, on the steeple of a church, or in office buildings. In many if not most cases there is no generator... just back-up batteries for shorter term "fill in" power. And many of those locations are zoned in such a way that there is no way to have a generator and the needed fuel supply because of zoning rules that simply will not allow such provisions.
I was told, unconfirmed, that one of the issues during the big fire that destroyed Paradise, CA, that cellular installations that had adequate solar backup that could keep them running indefinitely stopped working because the smoke was so thick that the batteries could not charge.
Through all of this, AM radio worked. FM, not so much as the transmitters were mostly on hill and mountain locations where the fires were at their worst.
What I think is needed is a change in dependencies: instead of counting on radio stations to be staffed with qualified news people 24/7, local city, county and state authorities have to be ready to activate long-term coverage via selected stations to provide information at times when those stations are not staffed. State broadcasters should encourage this, as it guarantees that car manufacturers will not approach broadcast radio as "no longer needed".
I have family members with various accents and none of them have issues with car commands. Since they have to recognized a more limited vocabulary, the chances that they work for nearly everyone are quite good.
Total sidebar: Have you noticed that the majority of photos that show someone's finger or thumb on a control, knob, dial or lever picture a horrible example of nasty grooming... with dirty, ragged or otherwise unkempt nails and skin?
I hadn't....and I grabbed that one off the net before coffee this morning. Hope it was okay.
...I should have noted that if you're using Apple CarPlay, it IS Siri.
Then again, actual people tell me they're having trouble hearing me. I don't know if it's the phone, which is over 30 years old and looks like the one on "Young Sheldon", or something the phone company can fix. We have fiber now.
As for the phone, I can't seem to find new ones in the store.
So we have a national shortage of cellphones? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Yes, it was nice. Most look like the person worked at an oil-change place or in trench digging.
I don't think it's a cellphone, David. he mentions fiber and "the phone company".
It's already called EAS. Municipalities try to do tests with their EAS systems to local stations, usually to crash and burn.
But what if the smartphone-dependent general public aren't listening to radio? Then what good would it do?
My wife's 2 year old GM car doesn't understand much of what we tell it. OTOH, I can dictate texts via Google on my Android phone with no problem.
This is his phone:
Attachments
I'll make a point of using it in the next few GM vehicles I get for review.
Where are the buttons you push? And what is that round thing? The remote control at the studios used to have one of those 30 years ago to select the reading I wanted...
This is what my consulting engineer in Puerto Rico once told a station owner who said he did not have enough money to pay a proposed fee: "pues jódete" (meaning, "then screw yourself").
Such a project would have to be accompanied by a campaign by "the authorities" explaining that, in a major and life threatening situation, the last resort and often the only one would be AM radio and every home needed such a device along with an adequate supply of non-rechargable batteries.
(I heard lots of stories from Puerto Rico 6 years ago about how "we had a radio and it was fully charged" from people who did not realize that you need AC to charge those batteries. After the first day, the radio did not work... after the first week, it did not work either. And in many places, after the first month, it still did not work. )
Where is the "send" button?
I have one of those old school dial phones hanging up in my kitchen. It’s a great conversation piece and it works brilliantly when the power goes out. I’ve got another one on a side table in the living room. Those are the only landline phones I still use, but they’re too cool to dump. When I was a teenager and was on the phone all of the time, my parents gave me an old rotary phone to use. It probably had better sound quality than any cell phone and saved me some RF exposure.
Smart thinking. We have a dial phone and an old non-electronic pushbutton phone in our emergency kit and costs nothing to keep around just in case!
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