Jelly bean contact search keeps getting it wrong

[Flackster]

Hi all, first post so go easy on me.

I purchased my first android phone, Galaxy Nexus, few days ago, and generally really happy with it.

But the voice searching is completely useless. I am from the UK, I don't have a thick accent (standard south east english). I've switched between US and UK english. But it's just as bad either way.

For example, I say "text Martyn i have arrived at airport"

But it can only ever see this as 'martin'. It doesn't find an exact match for it in contacts, and heads off to google for 'martin', despite the fact I have a contact called 'Martyn'.

Similar story with my wife Raquel... it gets it variously as 'Kracow', 'Rexel' or 'rack cow', but never Raquel.

But for some other contacts, it works fine... so it's not like it's not set to search contacts.

Surely, if I start a command with 'text' or 'call', it should figure out with pretty high certainty that it should search my contacts and look for the best match to what it *thinks* I said there?

Is it really not smart enough to figure out that I have a contact called 'Martyn', which sounds exactly the same as what it *thought* I said, which was 'martin'?

From a speech recognition point of view, this should be easy. I only have about 40 contacts in the phone. So one it has figured out what it *thinks* I said, it just needs to find the closest match in that 40 contacts, not in a 50,000 word dictionary!

Is there anyway to help it out (maybe adding keywords to certain contact records like 'martin' or 'rexel')?

These are the two contacts i need to call most, so it renders the voice-text-call functionality next to useless for me at present

EDIT: forgot to mention, I flashed the firmware after getting the phone and have latest Jelly Bean 4.1 on it

 

[Flackster]

Further update... I edited the contact 'Martyn' and added 'martin' as a nickname.

And still the jelly bean voice search takes me to google with this search:

'text martin'

So it understands and transcribes what I am saying pefectly.

But it cannot seem to figure out that i want to send a text to a contact called 'Martyn', who has a nickname 'martin'????

They've done all the hard work and they fall flat on their backsides at the final step.

When is Android 4.2 due?

 

[omoanya]

I'm having the same situation -- very strange ...

 

[breadnatty08]

Welcome to the forums, Flackster! Sorry to hear about your problems. I rarely use Voice Search on my Nexus (which is running JB as well), but when I do, I think it works great. I'm from the US with very little accent, so perhaps that helps (though I do mumble a lot ).
Have you tried any other voice search apps like Vlingo or Skyvi? Perhaps one of those would work better. As to 4.2, no one really knows. Best guess would be sometime late fall or winter.

 

[omoanya]

I am wondering whether the google account needs to be activated for contact sync ... maybe that is why its not finding out contacts. I don't use google for contacts so I don't have it synced - its giving me an option to merge, so I might try that and then try ics google voice search

 

[matttye]

Try renaming the contact to Martin and see if it works then.

Not suggesting this as a solution, just trying to figure out if it's not reading all contacts or just that one.