Usefulness of voice control questioned.
 

Do any of you have the newer generation of voice control?
Is it practical for:
telephone calls
changing a satellite radio station
playing ipod music

What are the voice prompts to do anything you use in your cayenne?
Does the voice recognition work well? Or will I need to develop a fake German accent?

i've had it on my current cayenne s, and never really used it much. it does do a good job of voice recognition, but i never really found myself using it that much, and as such, skipped it on the new one

I have it and would order again. Better than other voice systems I have tested and they have a voice calibration tool you can use that makes it pretty accurate. I'd guess it is right like 95-98% of the time. Great for call, changing audio sources, entering navigation addresses, etc. PCM is pretty simple though so it isn't strictly speaking a must have but I would get it.

What are some of the commands you have to speak to get it to do something.
Lets say you are listening to a cd, and you want to play "The Killers" on your Ipod.

Or you want to make a call to your brother on your cell phone.

Can anyone tell me what you have to do to prompt it accordingly? The dealer here doesn't have anything on the lot with voice control. Nor does anyone seem to have any first hand experience with it.

Let's take it from easy to hard.

Easy - phone calls. Just click the voice button and say "call joe blow" and as long as you have an entry in your cell phone for joe blow it will dial the number (or ask you which number to dial if joe has multiple entries). Works really well and you don't have to record a special voice entry for anything.

Easy - navigation. Just click on voice control, say navigation and you land on that menu. Then say enter address and it will say, in order, say the name of the city, the street, the house number. Does a very good job in my experience capturing it all. As you are navigating or just driving around you can also click on voice and say, for example, "find gas stations" and it will pull all of the stations around you up and you can choose them. You can even be more specific and say things like find French restaurants.

Easy - audio source and radio stations. Just click on the voice control and say 'source iPod' or 'satellite' or whatever and it switches. You can also say things from anywhere like 'station KQED' and it will find the station if it is in range. Same thing with numerical radio stations. That works really well for XM radio too.

Hard - iPod music. You can get to the source just fine using the above but if you want to play a specific track like the one you mentioned, it isn't so easy. You say 'source iPod', then 'artists', then it pulls a list of artists. Then you have to scroll down to the one you want instead of just saying the name. You can do all scrolling via voice control but it's a pain if you have a lot of music.

I get around the last limitation by just having the iPod shuffle through all of my music so I just have to say source iPod (or even source Bluetooth) and it plays that full library by default.

Thank you for the detailed response, this is exactly what I needed so I won't be disappointed when it comes in.

Is voice control still an option on the cayenne. It doesn't seem to be listed as an option in the online build any longer. I wonder if it is now standard.

Looks like it was taken off the configurator in the last 30 days...maybe Porsche felt guilty offering it as an option when it works so poorly. I've not experienced it directly but sales reps at my dealer say it's a mess and they don't order their cars with it.

I don't know if it was recently taken off, but I like it.
The phone portion was excellent.
I'd press the button and say "call home" (which I made as a contact), then it would call my home phone number. It would call the wrong person occasionally but it was better than other cars.
In a Range Rover it's just awful.
I'd press the button and you say make a call, call contact, Paul, is this correct? Sometimes it would give me options like which one? 1: Rob, 2: Paul, 3: Tom. Than ask me if this is right.
I wouldn't really use voice control for anything else like navigation though. Unless voice control scanned my saved addresses. Otherwise while reading an address and entering nav info I'm usually parked anyway.

Glad it's working for you...but your narrative would make me believe it's less than excellent - Rob, Paul and Tom aren't really that similar.

That would be a good reason to remove it from a Range Rover. I was comparing Porsche which was decent to a Range Rover which has very poor implementation.

I find the voice control to be excellent for what I use it for. When I ask it to call a number on my phone book it works perfectly (as long as I am calling a number I have programmed with voice recognition - other phone numbers may work as well but I haven't tried them). If a name has more than one number associated with it, it asks me what number I want ( private (meaning home), cellular, etc).

It also works great for navigation destinations that I have stored into memory. It has always worked without failure.

One flaw in the phone book is that if I have multiple numbers under a name and one is called home and the other is called home fax, it doesn't transfer the one under home fax. In order to get all the numbers to transfer I had to change the name from home fax to just fax. I suspect there may be other similar flaws.

I suspect that if I tried to use it to input a brand new address that it wouldn't work as well ( based on other systems I have used on the past ).