bluetooth speaker phone that announces name?

[meistervu]

I called up BlueAnt tech support, asked them about streaming to the ST3 a few questions about the S4.

The tech support person told me that ST3 will accept mono streaming if your phone has the supported bluetooth profile. It appeared that the iP4 doesn't do mono. That said, the ip4 speaker is good enough for Navigon use, so it doesn't concern me at all in this respect.

I do however have a young kid in the car on occasions, and she like to listen to an audio books on my phone (Tales2Go, trial period, great so far). being able to stream to the S4 is a big plus. I will see if I can get used to the S4.

I did mentioned my disappointment with the S4 to the tech support person, in particular the number of steps it takes to voice dial, and the fact that it reminds me every time it's about to go off hand free triggering mode (why not just do it. I know it will after 2 minutes of no command. It's like waiting for the other shoe to drop). He said that their feature sets are based on customer feedbacks I think they should provide a way to turn off that reminder in future firmware. They do for LED lights).

 

[psywzrd]

I called up BlueAnt tech support, asked them about streaming to the ST3 a few questions about the S4.

The tech support person told me that ST3 will accept mono streaming if your phone has the supported bluetooth profile. It appeared that the iP4 doesn't do mono. That said, the ip4 speaker is good enough for Navigon use, so it doesn't concern me at all in this respect.

I do however have a young kid in the car on occasions, and she like to listen to an audio books on my phone (Tales2Go, trial period, great so far). being able to stream to the S4 is a big plus. I will see if I can get used to the S4.

I did mentioned my disappointment with the S4 to the tech support person, in particular the number of steps it takes to voice dial, and the fact that it reminds me every time it's about to go off hand free triggering mode (why not just do it. I know it will after 2 minutes of no command. It's like waiting for the other shoe to drop). He said that their feature sets are based on customer feedbacks I think they should provide a way to turn off that reminder in future firmware. They do for LED lights).

Crap - now I'm rethinking my decision to get the S3 instead. They didn't mention the whole mono thing to me when I spoke with them yesterday. I'd like my nav prompts to be announced over the speakerphone and it sounds like the S3 isn't going to cut it. I wonder if I can try out the s3 and return it if I don't like it. I would guess Amazon allows returns of open items but I'll have to check their return policy before I crack open the box. Why can't we have the best of both worlds and have the S4 do voice dialing the same way the S3 does?

 

[psywzrd]

Well I hate to say it but I now have both an s3 and an s4 in my possession and neither one of these things is any good. The voice dialing on both of them is absolutely horrible. I tried a few calls on both and I would say it called the right person maybe 50% of the time - the other times it wasn't even close. Voice dialing on the s4 is a real pain to get to in the first place and once you do get to it there's another problem. After you say "call John Smith mobile", it reads back who it's calling but you can barely hear the damn thing (and this is with the volume all the way up). I can hear the other voice prompts just fine ("say a command", etc.) but the confirmation of who I'm calling is barely audible for some reason (God knows I need to be able to hear it too since chances are it's calling the wrong person and I'll need to hang up quickly). Also, the stupid button that you press to initiate the voice commands has no tactile feedback whatsoever (I know it's designed to be that way but it's terrible) and I have to press it two or three times to get to hang up a call or initiate the commands.

Activating voice control on the s3 is nice and easy but it can't seem to dial the right person either. Plus it does not play music from my ipod or read the directions from my nav program even though blueant support told me that it would

My old piece of crap T505 works better than both of these things other than the fact that I can't get the damn caller id to work. That thing voice dials correctly every time and if I could ever get it to read out the caller id like I think it should, I wouldn't need something else. Still, I need something with caller id so I'm still looking for suggestions.

 

[Sportcat]

I had a similar audio problem with the S4 - make sure the volume on your phone is turned up.

 

[psywzrd]

I had a similar audio problem with the S4 - make sure the volume on your phone is turned up.

Thank you for the suggestion - I could have sworn my volume was the all the way up on my iphone but it was not. That takes care of the problem of not being able to hear the confirmation of who I'm calling. I also set the sensitivity to low (it was on medium) and it seems to be doing a better job of voice dialing in my limited use since changing that setting (seems kind of backwards that lowering the sensitivity would help but whatever). I'll need to use it a bit more to see if I can deal with the shortcomings of the voice dialing aspect of the device though.

I did make a suggestion to blueant tech support. I told them that they should add a user configurable option where we can decide if we want a tap of the call button to automatically activate voice control on our phones. I also sent the same suggestion to them via the website and I would suggest you guys do the same if you'd like that option as well. I noticed that when you go into the bluetooth settings for the blueant on the iphone, there are several options in there. I'm no programmer but I would imagine it would be relatively simple for them to add another toggle in there that says "Tap to Voice Control" or something like that. Turning that on would mean a single tap of the phone button turns on voice control automatically (no confirmation needed other than the sound the phone makes when you activate voice control). Turning that toggle off would allow it to work exactly like it does now where you tap on the button and it says "say a command". That would seem to be a good compromise and it would dial your calls a heck of a lot quicker than it does right now.

 

[psywzrd]

I spoke with blueant tech support again today and they tell me that they do have plans to make the voice dial function more simple (they seem to change their story every time I speak with them). Anyway, I again made my suggestion from above and they also gave me an email address for someone I could email the same suggestion to (not sure if it will help but I did it).

A couple other things I noticed. When you turn the unit off and turn it back on, the sensitivity level returns to its default setting of medium - that makes no sense and it needs to be fixed. If I need it set to low because that's what works best for me, it should stay at low when I turn the unit off and turn it back on. They need to address that in the next firmware upgrade. I also noticed that the connection between the s4 and the iphone seems to drop a lot but I think that's the iphone's fault (hoping 4.1 fixes that).

Finally, for those of you that want to play music through the s4, you can tell it what you want to play by using the "phone commands" option. Since "phone commands" activates voice control on your phone, all you have to do after that is say "play artist Kings of Leon" or whatever you want to hear and it will play your selection. You can do the same thing for playlists too I believe and probably albums too (not 100% sure about that). I know this info might be obvious to some of you guys here but since it's not in the s4's manual, some people might not realize that it can be done. Basically, anything that can be done via the iphone built-in voice control can also be done via the s4 using "phone commands". This is another reason that I want an easier and quicker way to invoke the phone's voice control.

 

[Sportcat]

I was thinking about this thread today and wondered if you had made your mind up about which model to keep.

The beauty about the S4 is that the firmware is upgradable.

 

[psywzrd]

I was thinking about this thread today and wondered if you had made your mind up about which model to keep.

The beauty about the S4 is that the firmware is upgradable.

I decided to keep the s4 for now. It's far from perfect but I just don't think there's anything else out there right now that fits the bill for me. The s3 was ok but I didn't like the fact that music and nav commands don't play through it (plus I don't like the fact that you can't upgrade the firmware). At least with s4 there's a chance that they will listen to our suggestions and improve the unit via a firmware upgrade. It has a lot of features, and when it works it works very well. I want to at least give it a good trial once I upgrade my phone to 4.1 too (have to wait for the jb though). Since 4.1 is supposed to fix the bluetooth issues and add avrcp, I'm hoping that it will work much better then.