Voice assistant not responding - fixed?

[Richard_C]

(Mods please put elsewhere if you think that's best, posted becsue it might help others)

Citroen C4 MHEV 2025, subscribed to Connect Plus package. I think what follows will be the same for many other Stellantis cars on the same or similar platforms.

I'm not a great fan or user of "voice assistant" but because the navigation is locked down such that you can't do much via the screen while you are moving commands like "navigate to...." can be helpful. Its not worked for a long time, short press button on steering wheel, say something, blue squares rotate for 15 seconds or so and screen says "server did not respond". Grrrr. Ive been though the settings many times and tried all variations. If you hold the button for a few seconds more it activates google/android auto voice assistant perfectly so I assumed the microphone etc is as it should be.

But yesterday I fixed it, I think. I hope.

These cars have 2 USB sockets in the front, one is 'dumb' USB B for charging, the other is a USB C that communicates with the car. Because android auto (and carplay) work wirelessly so the phone doesnt need to be pluggeed in, I keep a USB stick in the USB C port and play music from an extensive library. The media screen recognises it and its contents, and it all works fine so its obvioulsy designed to allow that.

I unplugged the USB stick to take it indoors to add some folders but forgot about it, yesterday tried a 'navigate to' command expecting it to fail but it worked, so did the temperature up/down commands.

So - it looks as if having a USB stick in the port stops the car talking to its voice server.

(I wonder if .... I thought the car used a built in e-sim to talk to the world but I wonder if it uses a phone if it "sees" a phone. If it sees anything in the USB port it assumes its a phone so tries that and (being a dumb USB stick) inevitably fails. I don't really know, I doubt anybody does.)

[mickthemaverick]

I have moved your topic up a step in the Audio and Telematics area to hopefully expose it to more members. Thanks for posting it Richard.