Day 2 With Ford Escape Hybrid – Voice Recognition

My day 2 adventures with the Ford Escape Hybrid and SYNC found me experimenting with the voice recognition features — launching music, calling people, etc. I was quite pleased to learn that I didn’t have to set up any voice tags for my phone book because that would have been a big pain. Voice tags in SYNC are used to set up Destination points within the GPS. For example, assign a voice tag for Home, and you say DESTINATION Home for the GPS to map out the route to go home.

Switching to Voice mode is quite simple — just press the voice button on the steering wheel and then get going — make a phone call, launch music, etc. It is a nice feature that should help keep the driver as hands-free as possible. My results, however, were quite mixed. I tried multiple times to call my wife, Kathi, but the system kept recognizing it as someone else’s name. I had similar problems with ““PLAY ARTIST Audio Adrenaline” — it kept telling me that it couldn’t recognize the command. However, it had no problem with ““PLAY ARTIST Michael Card”. If I found myself speaking too quickly, the system would come back with a not recognized command error. I probably had to repeat the voice commands two to three times at least 50% of the time before it finally got it right. I’m going to keep experimenting with voice recognition, but I’ll probably end up using the touch controls instead.

I’ll capture the experience on video tomorrow, so you can see how it works for yourself.

Read up on my previous coverage here:

• Day 1 with Escape Hybrid and SYNC
• The Escape Hybrid Arrives