Absolutely sick of Alexa's god-awful navigation

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Is it just me? Or can Alexa / MapBox not ever find anything? Voice assistant is supposed to save time / keep hands on wheel while navigating, but is absolutely infuriating. For example, I asked it to go to the UPS Store. I'm literally parked in front of the store and it's telling me to go back out on the main highway and around the block:

This happens every day. No matter where I ask her to navigate to. Absolutely sub-par garbage experience compared to Google Maps / AA. My favorite, of course, was when I asked her to navigate to a charging station at the mall and she told me to get on the interstate. Yes, you can *see* the chargers from there... LOL. ?

/rant

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[Dark-Fx]

I don't typically have the same problems with mine. The reliability of local mapping data has a significant variability in different areas.

There does seem like there could be issues moving between services occasionally though, if it's sending a street address instead of a lat/long pinned location then it won't always be as exact.

 

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

There does seem like there could be issues moving between services occasionally though

It's not even that. It's like she acts like I'm speaking a foreign language, or something. She *refuses* to understand anything I say. Here's a few videos:

Can't find city hall:


Can't find my dog's vet:


Can't find FedEx depot:


The dumbest is in the "Can't find FedEx" bit. around the 4:20 minute mark I literally type the address into her navigation system, to confirm she knows the address. I then *read back the address to her exactly as it shows on the screen, and she still can't find it*:

I read the address back to her exactly as it's shown on the screen and she still tries to navigate to the wrong place. You might have to turn the volume up a bit to hear her responses. It's infuriating.

 

[Scoiatael]

One of the few brightspots my Lightning's software has over my old R1T. Having reliable navigation via Android Auto. Rivian really needs to step it up.

 

[Dark-Fx]

Definitely looks like a location translation problem for Alexa, because "manassas park city hall" comes up just fine in Mapbox itself. The pin might not be exactly where it needs to be but anyone could fix that.

.

Alexa might even just be completely throwing away the "park" part of the query because it's matching on just manassas.

 

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Alexa might even just be completely throwing away the "park" part of the query because it's matching on just manassas.

Valid point - I think that's what she's doing in that example. Heck, even residents of "Manassas" and "Manassas Park" get them confused sometimes (even though they are entirely separate cities), haha.

 

[Dark-Fx]

Valid point - I think that's what she's doing in that example. Heck, even residents of "Manassas" and "Manassas Park" get them confused sometimes (even though they are entirely separate cities), haha.

Amazon/Alexa's support tends to feel like a black hole trying to resolve anything like this too, so that doesn't help at all. The chat robots(overseas humans) seem to intentionally misunderstand you if it's something outside of their normal script.

 

[-0-coach-0-]

I am with you. It is a crap shoot when asking Alexa for navigation. There are times it will give me a location 600 miles away for something that is 5. This is one of the major downfalls with Rivian compared to my Tesla M3. The navigation in my Tesla is spot on and easy to use, as with Alexa, it gets it right about 1/2 the time.

 

[godfodder0901]

Is it just me? Or can Alexa / MapBox not ever find anything? Voice assistant is supposed to save time / keep hands on wheel while navigating, but is absolutely infuriating. For example, I asked it to go to the UPS Store. I'm literally parked in front of the store and it's telling me to go back out on the main highway and around the block:

This happens every day. No matter where I ask her to navigate to. Absolutely sub-par garbage experience compared to Google Maps / AA. My favorite, of course, was when I asked her to navigate to a charging station at the mall and she told me to get on the interstate. Yes, you can *see* the chargers from there... LOL. ?

/rant

Rivian currently uses Google for POI search.

 

[Tango45]

@Oldsmobile_Mike you gotta move out of manassas, bro.

 

[TexasBob]

It is absolutely NOT just you. Why the literal H3ll is it that Alexa does not know anything close to the same information that the map knows? They are obviously running to completely different databases. The map is perfectly fine. Alexa is an idiot. The entire thing would work much, much better if it was just a straight speech to text input to the nav search bar.

 

[Glembi2]

Rivian currently uses Google for POI search.

Does the in-truck navigation system use a different provider than the phone app?

Typing in addresses in the truck rarely works for me. I get better results typing in addresses in the phone app and then sending them to the truck.

 

[KRG]

Alexa is horrible, and I live in Orange County so should be properly mapped. I haven’t figured out how to make her work well at anything. She can’t find locations and she seems to almost always default to Amazon Music when I ask instead of Spotify. I’m sure this can be tweaked but haven’t bothered yet.

The navigation itself is quick and good here, so the problem is really just Alexa.

 

[godfodder0901]

Does the in-truck navigation system use a different provider than the phone app?

Typing in addresses in the truck rarely works for me. I get better results typing in addresses in the phone app and then sending them to the truck.

In-tuck search uses Google.

 

[mkhuffman]

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