I just came from fighting with the voice dial crap.

The manual is wrong about some of the voice commands(store name should be save name)

I managed to store some of the most used numbers in the voice phone address book.

It works but is kinda slow. In order to dial from the voice phone book you have to say the name stored and then confirm with a yes but seems to work well enough until i get a I phone

also my car is a no nav car so the update would not work on mine

 

The reason that they do not give us an address book, is that MINI/BMW ULF bluetooth modules can have up to 3 phones paired with them. If you and a passenger both get into the MINI at the same moment, and both have paired phones, the MINI will connect to the first phone that it "sees", and load that phone's address book. This is unlike Lexus, which one has to initially send the phonebook to.

The other reason that they do it this way, is so that if you add a contact to your phone, the MINI will always be current...it loads every time you start the car.

The probable reason that your phone books will not transfer is that your carrier (usually Verizon) has disabled the OPP (object push profile ), and/or the OBEX (Object Exchange profile) in the bluetooth stack on your phone. Call your carrier and ask them. Verizon does this to force you to use their "get it now", pay per play, service to get ringtones, pictures, etc. If your phone has OPP & OBEX, you can transfer to and from your computer & other bluetooth enabled devices. The unintended consequence of carrier greed (such as Verizon), is that phone books will not transfer also.

I was party to a class action suit against Verizon, a few years ago, for their false advertising of their phones Bluetooth capabilities. They now are pretty clear in their advertising, regarding what their bluetooth profiles will, and won't do.

By the way, if you have a functioning phone that DOES transfer the phonebook, the MINI's voice recognition can interpret your command to dial any of the contacts that have been transferred to the MINI's temporary address book...no need to set up a totally separate phone voice dial list

 

I have a Blackberry Pearl (Tmobile) that is recognized/transfers the phone contacts to the Mini when paired. But how do I get it to voice dial a name without setting it up in the car separately?

 

Just hit the voice button on the MFSW and say "Call John" (Assuming that you have a "John" in your address book.) The Voice Recognition software can interpret the entries in your phone book....pretty cool

 

It is cool. Although I don't know how it mistook "Brandon" for "Nancy".

 

Yeah, a lot of voice recognition devices do that. When I do them individually in the car and say "dial name" (say name) "Nancy" (it says "did you mean Nancy?" in my voice) it gets them right. Works for me. The BT phone thing could be better in that it should show more info about my phone contacts on the screen but it has limited number of letters to show.

 

Well, when I say "dial Brandon" and it responds, "do you want me to call Brandon?," it did not seem to like my response of "Of course, I want you to call Brandon; that's why i said call Brandon." It seems to prefer a simple "Yes, you moron."

 

LOL!!!

So what happends when you say "Call Vinny", and your from NY like me, and there are 6 Vinny's in my contacts?

 

I moved from NY a while ago, so I don't have any Vinny's.

 

It will usually get confused, then either change the radio to AM, or bring the nav map up in direction of travel mode.