Affected cars will no longer respond to the ‘Hey Google’ wake word
What’s the most fail-prone device in your life? For many of us, the car is probably at the top of that list, with anything that can go wrong in your car, from a failing clutch to a failing oxygen sensor. There is no shortage of Sometimes it feels like that curse has carried over to Android Auto, and every few months I catch up with the latest stories of phones not working well in cars that appear to be Android compatible. Some users are currently experiencing headaches when trying to access the Google Assistant.
As a small but growing number of Android users have discovered, this glitch prevents Auto’s Assistant from responding to the “Hey Google” wake word. If voice input is triggered via the on-screen interface or by pressing a hardware button, the interaction will still work, but voice-only attempts will either not respond or display a black screen. One common thread behind these reports is consistent with a small but increasing report rate, primarily affecting phones upgraded to run Android 13. is what it looks like.
Google seems to be aware of the issue, it’s been around for a few weeks now and there’s no official fix yet. We have received positive feedback regarding the advice to rollback the update and then try uninstalling the Google app to disable automatic updates. This isn’t an ideal solution, but it may be the best option for the time being.
While looking for other reports of this behavior, 9to5Google also found another newly identified auto issue where the text-to-speech output when receiving messages appears to be unavailable. I don’t yet know if these two voice-related issues are related, but I’ll keep an eye out for more details on both.