Driving and using the Pixel 7 Pro in voice only mode
I’ve got multiple fires going right now between the deceased tenant, her family coming to claim things, and then last week we were hit with 80mph straight line winds and there’s serious roofing damage. Throw in a blown out air conditioner at a rental and you’ve got a fiesta of problems. The past week I have made more phone calls than I think I have in several previous months combined.
Being able to voice to text is great, mass texts awesome, how I’m keeping and being kept in the loop on thing after thing and it’s the only way I keep up to date while driving… voice operations of the Pixel 7 Pro…
Today while driving into work I got a call from the roofing insurance adjuster (I’ve had zero claims for a decade I think, and now I have two in a month) – we talk for a bit as I’m on my ride into work and I get what he needs before the call quality sounds like he’s trying to emulate a Dalek. This is a quite reproducible event for me as you initiate a call north or south of Nashville and then as you’re heading through Nashville the call becomes unusable.
So, horrid call completed, I now need to text four people that there is going to be an insurance adjuster on the rooftop. I say to my Pixel 7 Pro “Hey google, send a text message to Nate” and it sits and spins for a second before asking what the message is. I tell him there will be an insurance adjuster on the roof. I glance over and see it’s gotten close to that in text recognition… close enough for a human to be able to tell what the message is.
Then it stops… “just a minute” and spins as it attempts to get the message somewhere to make sure that it’s right and then re-direct it into the messaging app. And there it stalls. I have a spinning message for the rest of eternity on the screen even though the on-board processing got the words completely, due to it not connecting to something out on the net it never continued.
Attempts to OK Google it again failed and in the end my options left were to wait another ten minutes, back out of whatever was stuck on the screen, and text away. Better late than never.
You would think that these problems would be fixed by now. But this is an issue that’s been going on for years. The … something… out there that the text has to go to before it comes back in and is handled by the messaging app, or whatever app needs to process it.
Seems like with Pixel 7’s on-board AI advertising budget they’d put more of the execution capabilities on board… if I have the text, and the box says text message, maybe you don’t need to do something else that involves the internet other than ask me if I want to send?
These are generally easy fixes on the user side – hit back a couple of times, then ask again… but driving I’m not touching my phone… and it should have some sort of logic at this point for when you can’t reach whatever it is for some amount of time that it gives up… but no, I had Nate’s text message stuck trying to go out for several miles.
Also it seems like at this point if you’ve talked to someone at phone number XXX-XXX-XXXX that there should be an announcement that a number you’ve talked to before is calling you… like I’m seriously trying to not save my insurance adjuster’s number to contacts.
