Hello. Has anybody inquired with MBUSA about In-Car Office in the US? The feature is available outside the US. See https://shop.mercedes-benz.com/en-cy...alTransition=1
Before the current AMG GLC 63s, I had my BMWs display a few initial lines of all incoming emails and if prompted, a synthetic voice would read selected email aloud. In the storage between the front seats, I had Android "car phone" without SIM card powering up as soon as the car was on. The "car" phone would log onto WiFi hotpot provided by "always on me" phone when I entered the car and both phones were connecting to BMW via Bluetooth. The "car phone" for the sole purpose of displaying new emails and the "always on me" phone for voice calls. I realized that one of my older HTC phones had an option to transmit new emails from selected account or from all accounts. .When I started to use Samsung phones, BMW would receive emails only from the account the phone was originally activated with when HTC would transmit all new emails from all accounts and connect for calls. I came up with two phones solution to have all emails from all accounts on the display after switching to Samsung.The "always on me" Samsung phone was connected to BMW over Bluetooth only to make and receive calls. It may sound complicated, but I miss that setup a lot.
The disadvantage of having two phones was the fact that BMW for quite some time allowed only two phones logged in at a time making my wife (the third phone) not very happy when we were traveling together.

 

Last time I checked, In-Car Office is not offered in the USA so far. Based on what I've seen it also isn't particularly good, IMO. You have to login with a PIN for security reasons every time the car is started. Seems very cumbersome and somewhat slow. Also, maybe it's just me, but checking one's email while driving is not an idea to be encouraged. The one part that is nice is the ability to view the calendar and quickly navigate to an appointment based on the calendar event location. However, I worked around that by creating a shortcut automation on my iPhone that let's me pick an upcoming calendar event and then share the location with the car where it pops up on the screen. So it's like two taps on my phone, and a click in the car to start the navigation. Much quicker than login to In-Car Office, navigate to the calendar and select the upcoming event, and more importantly, I can do it ahead of time before even getting in the car.

 

It's N/A in the US and cannot be activated. It's (bizarrely) only offered internationally.

 

Being able to listen to text messages, but not to the first 2-3 lines of unread email messages (or their subject lines...) is a bit incongruent, isn't it?

Is there a third-party workaround?

 

TonyG3D - BMWs I had allowed reading 2 or 3 lines of emails or listening to the entire email read out loud.
When it comes to MBUX, so far I haven't found even a trace of a solution that my lead to some workaround.

 

I have just found ping (by pingloud), an Android app on Google Play, that apparently can read all text app (except Signal) and email messages. It's a paid app, from $2/mo. to $7/mo., but it's unclear from the description what these 3 plans include or exclude...

If you have an iPhone, perhaps Talkler would do the job, but I'm not sure if it works with CarPlay.

 

I looked at these two. My understanding is that the apps don't integrate with MBUX over CarPlay or Android Auto and there is no way push sound through car's speakers. Am I wrong?

 

I did confirm with the ping developers that the app and Android Auto (AA) don't play well together, but they can be run in parallel, using the phone's speaker to interact with ping. Sounds like a cludge, but that's Google's policy on reading Gmail on AA.

I wonder how did BMW get around that?

 

Not sure it is. I personally see emails more like a desktop activity. I generally don't even read emails on my phone and I have the new email notifications turned off. I put things in emails that don't need immediate attention and I treat emails sent to me the same way. Folks I communicate with seem to understand that, too. Text messages on the other hand are short messages and more meant for immediate action. Just a step below a phone call.

 

I am not trying to pretend that I am some in car email expert, but I believe that that we are talking about three different approaches here:
1. BMWs F10, F06 and many others (in production for 10 years or so) were built to connect to the phone via BT where the car infrastructure would provide ability to display and/or read the emails as well as an interface for the voice calls. Replying to emails was available with a separate subscription which I didn't use.
2. MBUX with in Car Office system, without knowing any details, is most likely some board and software that allows receiving emails in the same fashion any additional user's phone or a computer would receive them and putting them on the screen or read them to the driver. For privacy, the settings accessible from MBUX screen need to be password protected. Without the password, all emails MBUX receives over car's WiFi could be read by anybody having access to the car e.g. service technicians, parking attendants, or anybody that the owner of the car would let driving it.
3. Apps like Ping reside on the phone itself where access to the car system is guarded by either CarPlay or AndroidAuto with an additional layer of restrictions imposed by software loaded by car manufacturers

I would love to have access to my emails when driving my MB. I don't need to listen to all of them, but wouldn't like to miss those requiring an immediate action.This is why I liked the system that displays info on sender, title and the initial wording with an option to listen to the selected messages when necessary.
When it comes to safety, using such system in a way I am describing it ,is not more distracting than selecting music feed, making an adjustment on navigation routing or playing with all different MB options like themes, info on HUD and so on.