I wasn't sure if this warranted a vehicle-specific post or if it's a general tech help question so I'll post it here too.
Does anyone else with a 2020 S-Class find that the voice control function is a disaster? It's so preposterously, unbelievably slow, and needs to get the wax out of its ears because it can never decipher what I'm saying, that it's almost unusable. It's not intuitive and can't understand basic commands. More than anything else, I just can't deal with how slow it is. The refreshed models with MBUX work extremely well. This 2020 S-Class (the last year of the non-MBUX W222 apparently) is just painfully slow when you try to tell it to navigate to a particular address. You tell it something, and the wheel just spins and spins and spins before it tells you it doesn't understand, misinterprets what you said, or brings back wildly inaccurate addresses/results, or in a small percentage of cases, actually works. While the car is absolutely beautiful, and is a feat of engineering, the technology/voice command component works like it's 2005.
Having some basic understanding of how these things work, as I understand it that while Mercedes/Daimler designs and builds the cars, the "Connected Car" component is left to MBUSA or the destination country to implement. Mercedes used to use a system called TeleAid, which around 2010 transitioned into a "smarter" but painfully slow and unreliable system with expanded capability. In the last couple of years and going forward they are transitioning to MBUX, which is finally designed well and works. The late model COMAND systems in the W222 and other pre-MBUX cars have internet access and internet connected features, which in cars from before 2016/2017 used Verizon 3G, and from 2016/2017-MBUX used Verizon LTE and were a smidge better than the practically unusable "connected car" features in the 2010-2016 COMAND systems.
The problem I believe that makes the W222 voice control so darn slow, is that when you tell it to navigate somewhere, it is also using the internet to do a search on what you said. So for instance if you say "Navigate to the Main Street Mall" it will use the internet to find the address for that. The problem is that the pre-MBUX internet hookup is SO SLOW and under equipped, that it bottlenecks this entire process, and bogs down the whole voice control system. I feel this way because I also have driven a 2018 GLC, which uses the same COMAND system but without the fancy S-Class internet features and extras, and thus when I tell it to navigate to "123 Main Street" it just does basic parsing to dictate my voice message into a text address, which it then inputs into the GPS. It does not have an internet search feature built into the voice control system, and thus it is much faster.
The W222 S-Class meanwhile, whether you read it an address (Navigate to 123 Main Street), or tell it a destination (Navigate to John's Restaurant in Palm Beach), it's still doing an internet lookup on what you say as part of its process, and due to the fact that the pre-MBUX internet system is so slow and underpowered, it bottlenecks the voice control system.
If there was a way to disable the Internet-related feature of this, and just be able to say (Navigate to 123 Main Street), it would work MUCH faster. I can't seem to figure out if it's even possible to do that. It seems like the only option is to trade for the 2021 W223 MBUX S-Class which, I assume like the rest of the MBUX cars, fixes this poorly performing system.
Or maybe I'm wrong about how it works/where the issue is, and it's just very slow and inaccurate.
I have tried calling the local dealer, but honestly there isn't much they can do to fix this since it's how it was designed, and I feel like many of them don't understand it. MB corporate and MB USA know the system sucks, and you'd assume they'd just play dumb about it, since it really cannot be fixed as far as I know.
Does anyone else have any thoughts/experiences with this thing? I can't (I guess I can) believe that such a top of the line, 2020 vehicle has such problems. Has anyone been able to fix it?
Thanks.
Does anyone else with a 2020 S-Class find that the voice control function is a disaster? It's so preposterously, unbelievably slow, and needs to get the wax out of its ears because it can never decipher what I'm saying, that it's almost unusable. It's not intuitive and can't understand basic commands. More than anything else, I just can't deal with how slow it is. The refreshed models with MBUX work extremely well. This 2020 S-Class (the last year of the non-MBUX W222 apparently) is just painfully slow when you try to tell it to navigate to a particular address. You tell it something, and the wheel just spins and spins and spins before it tells you it doesn't understand, misinterprets what you said, or brings back wildly inaccurate addresses/results, or in a small percentage of cases, actually works. While the car is absolutely beautiful, and is a feat of engineering, the technology/voice command component works like it's 2005.
Having some basic understanding of how these things work, as I understand it that while Mercedes/Daimler designs and builds the cars, the "Connected Car" component is left to MBUSA or the destination country to implement. Mercedes used to use a system called TeleAid, which around 2010 transitioned into a "smarter" but painfully slow and unreliable system with expanded capability. In the last couple of years and going forward they are transitioning to MBUX, which is finally designed well and works. The late model COMAND systems in the W222 and other pre-MBUX cars have internet access and internet connected features, which in cars from before 2016/2017 used Verizon 3G, and from 2016/2017-MBUX used Verizon LTE and were a smidge better than the practically unusable "connected car" features in the 2010-2016 COMAND systems.
The problem I believe that makes the W222 voice control so darn slow, is that when you tell it to navigate somewhere, it is also using the internet to do a search on what you said. So for instance if you say "Navigate to the Main Street Mall" it will use the internet to find the address for that. The problem is that the pre-MBUX internet hookup is SO SLOW and under equipped, that it bottlenecks this entire process, and bogs down the whole voice control system. I feel this way because I also have driven a 2018 GLC, which uses the same COMAND system but without the fancy S-Class internet features and extras, and thus when I tell it to navigate to "123 Main Street" it just does basic parsing to dictate my voice message into a text address, which it then inputs into the GPS. It does not have an internet search feature built into the voice control system, and thus it is much faster.
The W222 S-Class meanwhile, whether you read it an address (Navigate to 123 Main Street), or tell it a destination (Navigate to John's Restaurant in Palm Beach), it's still doing an internet lookup on what you say as part of its process, and due to the fact that the pre-MBUX internet system is so slow and underpowered, it bottlenecks the voice control system.
If there was a way to disable the Internet-related feature of this, and just be able to say (Navigate to 123 Main Street), it would work MUCH faster. I can't seem to figure out if it's even possible to do that. It seems like the only option is to trade for the 2021 W223 MBUX S-Class which, I assume like the rest of the MBUX cars, fixes this poorly performing system.
Or maybe I'm wrong about how it works/where the issue is, and it's just very slow and inaccurate.
I have tried calling the local dealer, but honestly there isn't much they can do to fix this since it's how it was designed, and I feel like many of them don't understand it. MB corporate and MB USA know the system sucks, and you'd assume they'd just play dumb about it, since it really cannot be fixed as far as I know.
Does anyone else have any thoughts/experiences with this thing? I can't (I guess I can) believe that such a top of the line, 2020 vehicle has such problems. Has anyone been able to fix it?
Thanks.
