I recently spent some time with just about every new vehicle in BMW’s North American lineup at once. During that sampler platter of Bavarian metal, it quickly became clear that one of BMW’s special dishes of the day was voice controls. Specifically for iDrive 8-equipped cars. And I understand why, as BMW’s newest AI assistant is better than ever before. However, it’s still not good enough, in my opinion.
While testing out BMW’s new AI assistant, which I used most in the new 7 Series, I think I heard 15 different people tell me that it can understand over 600 commands. I heard it constantly. It was clearly one of the brand’s main talking points for the team that day. And it’s true, it can understand a huge number of commands, even sort of obscure ones, like telling the 7 Series’ open its power doors “as far as you can.” That tells the car to open the doors as far as possible, if there’s something obstructing the door from opening all the way. Pretty neat, right? Right. And all of the commands are every bit as useful. However, there’s just one problem—the system has to hear you first.
I was testing out some of the 7 Series’ new commands in the best case scenario. Car on, parked in a mostly empty parking lot, no noise around me, alone in the car, and while sitting in the driver’s seat. One of the main commands I sampled was asking it to open and close specific doors. And it works brilliantly, once the AI assistant heard and understood me. The problem is, it doesn’t always do that and it isn’t much better at understanding than it was in its previous iteration.
On several occasions, the system wouldn’t respond to its wake-up command, “Hey, BMW.” And on several more occasions, once it did wake up and I gave it a command, it would respond by saying it didn’t understand. Then I’d have to wake it up again and sometimes it wouldn’t work right away.
Now, that wouldn’t be a big deal in the slightest if BMW wasn’t pushing for voice commands to become the new primary mode of infotainment interaction. But it is. BMW is burying simple things into submenus in…
