Is there any way to tune or train this? Voice command is wrong 90% of the time I try to give a command. I speak unaccented American english.

 

I am jealous of your 10% success rate.

 

i have heavy accent and my18 e63s understands me 80% !!!!

I actually use navigation commands, climate control, seat position and it works to my surprise!
May be you should try to use some european accent lol?

 

You must say ..... “Pppppleeease” and no swearing is allowed 😁

 

Did you set up your voice individualization? If not try this. This is a older model but I believe the sequence is the same.

 

Any specific commands that are not working? I have a 2019 C63S, but same COMAND system as yours and I pretty much have near 100% success rate. I actually started using the system more for navigation recently and was surprised at how well it found places using the "Navigate to...." command. I was even able to tell it a place on a specific street in a specific town and it found the location I was looking for. This didn't use to work so well, but I think not many are aware that the voice system receives updates as part of the regular map updates. However, the voice system updates have to be manually downloaded from the portal and installed via an SD card or USB stick. Is your system fully up to date? Each region comes with updated voice recognition data. These updates clearly add commands and improve existing commands not just related to navigation. Latest version is 360. Just to be save, I updated all my regions. It fixed the voice recognition not working for dictating text messages for example.

 

It also depends what you're trying to do. It works every time when I select radio stations, for instance, but never when trying to navigate to a POI. Use CarPlay/Android Auto for anything it can do and COMAND voice for selecting COMAND options.

 

Sure didn't! Thanks for the tip. I am going to give it a try this week while I eat yet another lunch in my car during COVID.

 

Also the mics for voice command are on the top of the rear view mirror. So when you give commands you should speak a little upwards not at your steering or command screen.

 

Just had to double check to confirm, but the latest generation Linguatronic no longer has voice individualization. That was something that older generations had. The latest generation is supposed to work with different accents out of the box. FWIW, I'm not a native English speaker. While I was born and grew up in a German speaking country, I don't have a German accent, either, in case folks think it does better with a German accent.

Best advise I can give is to speak naturally and not emphasize the words and as mentioned above, don't turn your head and speak away from the mic. You don't have to directly speak towards the ceiling, but it works best from the driver's seat and if you speak looking forward. Many times I observe people change the way they speak if they are talking to a machine. That's actually more counterproductive than anything. You do need to pronounce the words clearly and don't slur them into each other, but keep speaking naturally. These systems are trained to understand normal speaking. Don't talk to it like it's a child, or start to emphasize certain parts if it doesn't understand you the first time. That just makes it worse. Also, while it does reduce fan speed while talking, do not aim your center vents upwards. That potentially creates wind noise blowing by the mic. I made this mistake many years ago in one of my earlier voice enabled cars. It wouldn't understand a single word, until I realized it basically couldn't hear me because of the center vents blowing air at the mic.

And as I mentioned above, make sure you have the latest voice recognition data updates installed.

 

I believe the voice individualization is a feature up through 2019 models.

 

That's not true as far as I know. The W213 doesn't have voice individualization anymore. At least not for 2019 onward, and I also just checked the 2018 owners manual, and nothing there, either. NTG 5.5 as far as I know has the latest generation Linguatronic and no longer requires voice individualization. It was also the first system that is able to control car settings via voice command and not just the typical phone, media and navigation stuff, e.g turning seat heater on/off via voice command or change the ambient light color etc. NTG5 and older still had the voice individualization and were much more limited. MBUX like Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa etc. now also requires an online connection and send the voice to back end servers for a richer recognition. Linguatronic does the voice recognition completely local, so it works even without an Internet connection and nobody at Mercedes has the ability to listen in as is the case with all these other systems, which sometimes record private conversations that can and are being listened to by employees all for the sake of improving the system of course.

 

I guess it depends on what model you have, I see it available for 2018 B, C, CLA, AMG GT, GLA, GLC, GLE, GLS and G class. E and S class don't appear to have it in 18. Some models actually had a separate voice comand manual.

 

Yes, the various model get their tech updates at various stages. Not every model gets a FL or a new generation at the same time. The W213 introduced the NTG5.5 COMAND system and it was later added to the S Class and the FL C Class and FL AMG GT as well as the GT 4-door. The most recent models that got a FL skipped NTG5.5 and went straight to MBUX such as the GLC, GLE etc. 2019 was also a significant year as MB switched from mBrace to the new Mercedes Me Connect for all its 2019+ models, which added over-the-air map updates etc. So everything is kinda new and different now for 2019+ models. Some have NTG5.5 and others are running MBUX, but the old COMAND stuff is essentially done in all models at this point. OP has a 2019 W213, so all the newest changes except for MBUX applies to them.

 

NTG 5*5 has no hard drive. Therefore, no place to store voice personalizations. But as I said earlier, it seems to understand very well when scanning against its limited set of words. When trying to convert generic speech to text, as with a POI, it is no google.

 

I'm not sure about not having a harddrive. It's got to have significant storage to store the maps etc. The update files alone for the entire USA are over 16GB. But yes, I said the same, the voice recognition is very good, IMO. One doesn't even have to stick to exact commands. It has a certain degree of freedom and it's also dialog based, so you can follow up with additional commands during a single session. Even recognizing POIs is actually rather good. It does use HERE Local Search and sends the POI to the server backend for recognition. I have many friends with foreign names and visit places with foreign names, and it has no problem recognizing them. Also as I said earlier you can be quite specific with POI searches. For example the other day I said "Navigate to Blue Bottle Coffee on Webster Street in Oakland" to plot a route coming come from a road trip and stop at my favorite coffee shop. The Webster Street location was immediately found and was the first one on the list. Google doesn't do it any better. The online searches were kinda slow when I first got the car last year, but they've clearly improved the backend services that are powering this stuff. Similarly, while I'm not using it a lot, the text message dictation is an app and it also uses online voice recognition to understand free spoken text. It was broken for a while, but after I updated all my region with the latest voice data files, it started working again. I still mostly use Siri Eyesfree to send a text message as long pressing the voice command button and then saying something like "Tell John I'm running late" is much quicker than waiting for the dictation app to load and then start dictating. It involves many more clicks and wait time before a text can actually be sent. So, it's great to be able to use either the car's voice recognition or the phone's voice recognition depending on which is better for a given task. Neither one has let me down yet, except after a while my phone has an issue with Siri Eyesfree and I have to restart it before it works again. I noticed this in loaner cars with MBUX as well, so it's something Apple needs to fix.

 

Yes, that didn't really say what I meant. The HDD is now internal and they seem to be limiting what it can host. In addition to voice personalizarion, there are no more personal POIs. For some reason, the 5.5 version limits the information stored on the HDD.

 

Appreciate everyone's input. The 2019 E63 does not have individualization that I can see either. Will try the maps update, good idea.

I've tried speaking slowly and regular. It's so bad that if I say, navigate to 800 N. Jones Street, Dallas it will ask me which Jazz song I want to listen to. Seriously it's so far off that it's comical. Dealer says nothing to do.

I picked car up in Germany with the european delivery program and I swear the Kraut who demo'd my car it recognized everything he said. Doesn't work for my wife either. Bizarre.

 

Goddamnit!

Lol, just kidding

 

Just curious, when you give it navigation commands are you on the navigation screen? Or media, radio? Basically what menu are you in? Not that it should matter.

 

That is bizarre. Something must be going on with yours. Wonder if your mic is broken. Do you wait for the beep before you start speaking? "Navigate to..." is the command I use the most and it's dead on most of the time. Doing a good job finding the destination, however I mostly use to navigate to somewhere by name and not a specific address, but a plain address should work as well. Try "Navigate to address 800 N. Jones.....". That should shortcut it and not search all the sources, but if the command isn't understood in the first place, then it's a moot point.

BTW, they do reprogram the COMAND system at the VPC after ED to load the US maps and who knows what else. Maybe they screwed something up. I did ED as well.

Many of the commands are global commands. Navigate to, Call or Text message etc. Changing radio stations also works from anywhere. Those are the ones I use most frequently. Changing the SiriusXM station for example is as easy as saying "Channel <name of channel>" from anywhere.