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Even the techiest cars today have clunky voice features compared to what you'll experience on an iPhone or Android phone. When Ford updated its SYNC infotainment system (to version 3.6.2) in August, it claimed to have improved the speech recognition. We just got a chance to try it while driving the 2014 Fiesta ST.
In recent commercials for SYNC, a trendy-looking driver jumps into the car and calls forth music by mainstream acts like Michael Bolton or The Strokes. That's too easy, we thought, so we threw more eclectic band names at our SYNC system: Sigur Rós, Yamantaka, Amor de Días, and Waxahatchee.
The large touchscreen in the Ford Fiesta ST can also react to voice commands.
SYNC didn't blink—it nailed every one. Of course, it was prepared. When we connected our iPhone to the system via USB, it downloaded our playlist for indexing and had all those band names for ready reference. But what also helped was the system's new support for "fuzzy" search, meaning you could say a word incorrectly, and SYNC would still have a good chance of returning the correct result.
In our attempts, even when we purposely botched Sigur Rós (here's the correct pronunciation), SYNC still found the right artist. The only complication was a new Minneapolis band called Poliça. We pronounced it "polika," but SYNC understood us only when we pronounced it "police-ah".
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