Cortana on band in the car

Joe920

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Nov 13, 2012
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Just tried using Cortana in the car, and it works great. When you play music from WP8.1 over the car stereo via bluetooth, you can use Cortana on the band without music interrupting. So for example, you can say 'play the Strokes' while something else is playing, and the music never stops. It does take a while for things to happen though.

So the big benefit: you no longer have to take your phone out of your pocket to control the music in your car. Awesome!
 

Joe920

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OK, so one ride further I noticed two downsides. First, it turns on the phone display in your pocket as it opens the cortana app. Not sure if that could lead to accidental key presses or battery drain. And second, if you like to play your music loud, it might interfere with your voice command. The band should probably dim the music while listening. Where's that uservoice page!

I let her listen to Nicky Minaj for a bit, resulting in "I'm sorry, I didn't get that." Me neither.. :)
 

Joe920

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Did some more driving. Trying to start navigation from the band is not great. On my 1520 /CX5 combo the bluetooth audio stuttered like crazy, not sure if this was a one time thing. It also took quite a while (twenty seconds?) to get any response.

​I tried something like "navigate me to Target" which had multiple results. Unfortunately you don't get voice prompts for those, so you can't pick the destination hands free. Hitting the action button while driving is also not too comfortable, it would be nicer if there was a gesture to activate listening mode.
 

Cartman

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Try saying "Getme to the nearest target".

I did something like that and it immediately started navigating me there without any further action. It was really neat as all I did was hit the action button to activate Cortana and said "Get me to the nearest DMV".
 

tmark86

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I agree with your Band and Cortana assessments and while I haven't tried that method yet, I wanted to give you some my results with Cortana and my Bluetooth radio.

When I got my 97 Jeep Wrangler used earlier this year I was surprised to find a brand new radio with Bluetooth capabilities and voice commands. WP and Cortana work through the radio BUT being a Jeep and also with the music, the commands are very hard without me yelling. My radio has a nice feature where I can push in the volume knob to activate Cortana/voice but it always seems to take a while to transmit those signals back to the phone and then it does stutter when reading it back over the radio. Sounds like a similar situation with the Band, Cortana and the Radio.

Sometime this week while I am driving around I will have to give the whole "setup" a test now that I have a Bluetooth radio connected to WP and the Band also connected. Hopefully I can push my radio volume knob to activate Cortana, talk into my Band and have it pick it up and see if it works better.
 

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