Google Assistant is straight up ignoring some Android Auto voice commands

By Jason England
published

Android Auto 2
Android Auto 2 (Image credit: Android Central)

What you need to know

  • Some users are reporting an issue where Google Assistant refuses to respond to queries in Android Auto.
  • Viewing your Google activity reveals that Assistant is hearing and understanding the commands, but it simply fails to respond.
  • A community specialist has acknowledged the complaints on the Google support forums, but there has been no statement or update given on the status.

Google created Assistant to make our lives easier, and over the years, it has spread to more and more devices to give us a helping hand. When it works, it can be life-changing. Unfortunately, Assistant doesn't always work, such as the recent case with Android Auto.

Some users have been reporting that Assistant is failing to respond to queries, which is bad enough, but it gets even worse. That's because one user decided to check his Google history with myactivity.google.com and saw that Assistant is hearing and understanding the commands just fine, it is simply ignoring them.

Android Auto Assistant activity

Source: Android Police (Image credit: Source: Android Police)

If there's one thing worse than your Assistant mishearing you, it's when it just plain ignores you. There is already a growing thread on Google's support forum over the issue, and it has even been marked as a "duplicate of a trending issue." As far as trends go, this is not one to look forward to.

Some users have reported a "double beep" which appears to be Assistant cutting itself off before it can reply, while others have experienced mixed results with Assistant only failing with specific requests (such as "Play the news"). Either way, it's not good, especially when you're in the car and your focus needs to be on your surroundings instead of fighting with Assistant.

So far, there hasn't been any statement from Google, but a community specialist has acknowledged the complaint. Hopefully, that means Google is working on resolving the issue as quickly as possible.

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Jason England
Jason England
4 Comments
  • My brand new roav bolt has been doing this.
    Thankfully half the intrigue was the Bluetooth/aux connection
  • Google Assistant gets worse everyday. Simple commands it no longer understands, not answering, etc., etc.
    Used the be so good, now ju frustrating and awful...
  • Yeah I have had it multiple times repeating the command or mentioning what it is doing in detail about what I asked it to do for playing music....and then....silence. Sometimes since I am driving of course, I just leave it be and ignore it and continue the trip. On several of those occasions, it might actually start playing 5-10 minutes later on my drive. I don't have network connectivity issues where I am so I wouldn't account it to that. Also recently the google home small pucks have been acting odd. If I request that it play something in the bedroom when I am going to sleep it responds with something along the lines of "I'm sorry, we can't help you with that try again later"...and then it does exactly what I just told it to do. I don't need to try later, it should have just said, "no problem".
  • I've noticed that some of the commands when in Auto have changed. I was trying to reply to a text message and I would says "Yes" when asked if I want to reply and nothing would happen. Eventually i figured out I had to say reply when she asked if I wanted to reply. The other problem with Assistant / Auto lately is because they have been rolling out so many updates to the assistant I sometimes don't use before getting in the car and have not accepted the permissions for it since it was updated. Once I am in the car it just says follow the prompts and I am unable to do anything until I pull over and go through the permission exception again.