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Comment by rmatt2000 | Hacker News Reader

rmatt2000

I used to own a Ford Fusion with an early version of Sync. The car itself was great. The Sync software by Microsoft, however, was not.

One of the innumerable bugs was in the voice recognition system. No matter what song I requested, about half the time it played "Tiny Dancer" by Elton John.

I was demonstrating this bug to a friend who asked "What happens when you request Tiny Dancer?" Sure enough, it played something else.

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I bought a Focus with Sync 1 last year, and it was infuriating. The most infuriating part was that every time the car starts it defaulted to aux in mode, and there’s no button on the panel to switch to Bluetooth — if I wanted to listen to music from my phone, it took about 8 or 9 button presses to navigate through three levels of nested menus to get to the “media source” option. Every time I got in the car.

I finally ripped the thing out and replaced it with a cheap Chinese CarPlay head unit that I got on clearance because it shipped with defective software (there was a firmware update available to fix it). I could not be happier with it.

Did you have any issues with the climate system? I’ve been thinking about doing this for an annoying Sync 3 unit but I’m worried it’s too deeply integrated in some way.

I know exactly what you mean. I didn't replace it, but instead in my muscle memory (and part of my car "boot sequence") is pressing a button, precisely turning a knob twice and pressing a button again. I've done it thousands of times now.

Ford Fusion 2012 BTW

Ah, the combo is actually different, and longer. Funny how you can do something so many times but fail to explain it accurately. I guess that's muscle memory for you.

what year was Sync 1? My 2013 f-150 has sync, i think, no touchscreen or anything, and for bluetooth i do have to push the "talk to car" button on the steering wheel and wait 3 seconds for it to talk to me, then say "bluetooth audio". But i use siriusXM or USB 99% of the time anyhow.

There is a bug in my version though, sometimes it resets to Aux, which is funny, because if you have a USB stick in it, you cannot switch to aux without unplugging it - yet if it bugs out to aux, you can just switch back to usb by saying "USB".

I'm just glad i don't have a touchscreen. I'm not looking forward to a future car purchase where i don't have a choice.

AFAIK, if you don't have a touchscreen you've got Sync 1 (it's the 4-inch LCD). Unfortunately, my steering wheel controls don't work, so I couldn't use voice control to change the input (and replacing the head unit was way less complex & expensive than the steering wheel controls).

I don't mind the touch screen for CarPlay since all the important controls (volume, mute, skip, Siri) have physical buttons, all the unimportant controls are very large and hard to miss, and CarPlay has very few menus requiring more than 1-2 taps; though I had to be careful to pick out a CarPlay unit with an actual knob for volume, since a lot of them just have buttons that you have to mash repeatedly to change the volume. But not having the physical buttons at all would really suck, especially for things like climate control.

For me, Sync only worked well to make phone calls ("Call Joe")

And during a brief period, I also had a windows phone, where you could say "Call Cortana". Cortana was registered as a fake contact behind the scenes, and all it would do is trigger the Cortana assistant through that phone call. You'd then tell Cortana what you wanted, and it had much better voice recognition and capabilities than Sync, so it did what you wanted 99% of the time. It was pretty cool.

Of course it was annoying and a waste of time as you had to always make that call first, but I'm glad the engineers on Cortana remembered that "all problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection"!

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