OK, I have a Motorola Droid. I was able to transfer my entire address from my phone's SD card into the car via bluetooth. It now show all my contacts and even has appropriate numbers listed for work, mobile, etc. when I view a contact in the car.

When I use voice command "Dial Name", it asks me to say the name. I say a name and it usually gives me the correct person or a short list of people and asks me to select the correct person. I do and then it asks Home, Work, Mobile, etc. I specify which and then it usually asks me again for Home or Work, and when I respond it tells me there is no number entered for that item. If I go into the contact to check, I see all of their numbers correctly listed there.

How is "Dial Name" supposed to work? Can someone give me an example of a successful sequence?

 

I've had the same frustration

Check that the phone #'s are under "assigned" when you view the name in your address book, and not at the bottom of the listing. If they are at the bottom, nothing works!

 

How did you transfer all your contacts via bluetooth? I have a Motorola Droid and there's no option on the phone to do it. Did you have to download an application on your phone? Thanks!

 

and I just posted the details in another thread but here is the short version:

Get "Bluetooth File Transfer" from the market, go to Contacts and there should be an option to export to SD Card when use the menu button. Once exports to SD Card, go to Bluetooth File Transfer. In the car, go to the phone menu and there is an option to import business card files or something like that. Choose that and then from Bluetooth File Transfer you can send that file to the car... it will upload all of your contacts.

 

Hmmmm not sure what you mean "assigned" Where do I see that in the menu? Are you saying that when you changed them to "assigned", it started working for you?

Going to the car now to check.

 

Opps Wasn't in my car - it's actually "classified" and it's under "change category" in the options tab, which you access when you highlight a phone number in your address book. Changing them to "classified" allowed me to use voice tags as well (P108 in Command manual).

 

I think I just discovered this while sitting in the car playing. Wow, I have 200 contacts I'd need to do this to?!? This is unacceptable.

The issue actually looks like it is an unforgiving address book design. There are TWO sets category types. The main categories are "HOME" and "WORK". The sub categories are "LANDLINE", "MOBILE" and "CAR".

My exported phone list only has info for the sub categories and not the main. This is kind of ridiculous... since the address book entries don't have the parent category set, I can't use voice command dial by name!!! I have to change all 200. Seems they could have easily just done away with the parent categories and just have had landline1, 2, 3, mobile 1,2,3. Who even needs a "CAR" category anymore?!? How many CAR phones are people having these days? It's only MOBILE.

This blows. I will have to see if I can either categorize them in batch on my phone or change the export file.

 

I hope you can find a way to batch change them - I only did the ones that I have attached voice tags. I also found out that it is much quicker to call "home" (using a voice tag) by creating a new phone contact with the surname of "home" and only having a home + landline phone number. Saves many useless steps talking to the car!

 

I may be way off base here if you're in sales or some other field that would require many different calls to many different people each day, but I'd think you could probably get away with changing 20 or so numbers, the ones you call the most. I have 200 people in my phone list and maybe call 10 of them or less more than once every few weeks.

 

This is a good point. Thought about this but I guess I'm just frustrated that the system doesn't deal with this gracefully.

The way I used my phone in my bimmer was I'd have those most frequently called people as speed dials. I'd mostly use the "Dial Name" feature for calling the less frequently called people because I'd remember them by name, not number.

I'm going to dig into this to see what I can find.

I'm interested to know if anyone else has an address book import file that properly set up categories so they could call contacts using Dial Name without having to tweak settings in the address book in the car.

 

Can you assign a voice control tag to a specific name in the Comand phone book? My 221 phone book supports this. If I just say "Dial Kevin", the car starts calling the number I've stored for Kevin (it could be "Kevin Smith" or anything to which I've assigned the voice tag) unless the phone book entry has several numbers in which case Comand asks if I want to call Kevin "home" or "work" etc.

 

I'm guessing this can be done but it would probably take just as long to set those up as it would be to fix the address book entries.

 

Hey, I think I got it!!! I opened up the VCard file (.VCF). It is a readable text format. I simply did a search and replace on some of the terms to get this to work in the car. Here are some of the things I changed:

TEL;CELL: -> TEL;CEL;HOME:
TEL;HOME;VOICE: -> TEL;HOME;LANDLINE;VOICE:

It took only a minute to change the whole file using search and replace!

Once I fixed the file, I had to figure out a way to delete the current address book. I couldn't find a way to do this without going to System and then Reset!! That sucked because I lost all my stations presets!! Anyone know another way to delete just the address book?

So, after loading the new file, I was successfully able to choose a contact and number using "Dial Name". I don't like how many questions it asks though. It went something like this:

Me: Dial Name
System: Please say the name
Me: John Doe
'system lists a few contact choices'
System: Please choose the line (from the number list of contacts it found)
Me: 1
System: Home or Work, Landline, Mobile, Car?
Me: Mobile
System: Home or Work?
Me: Home
'number comes up'
System: Is this correct?
Me: Yes
system dials number FINALLY!

I found if I say the last name first "Doe John" it is more likely find the correct contact rather than give me a list of possible contacts... the address book lists them last name first but don't see why it would have trouble picking from the book if I say the first name first!

I also found that I can list all items at once to minimize questions like this:

Me: Dial Name
System: Please say the name
Me: Doe John Home Mobile
system lists the number
System: Is this correct?
Me Yes
system dials

Hope this helps... if anyone knows an easier way to use the system, let us know!