For me, the thing that killed voice commands had nothing to do with speech technology. It was latency and error handling.
At the start of my morning commute, I would say, "Ok Google, navigate to work".
Often, this would fail because I was in the network limbo area outside my house, where my phone struggles to transition from home WiFi to data.
Worst of all: The failure would be horribly slow. I would have to drive for another 30s before my phone realized, yes, we are really out of WiFi range now. And the voice command wouldn't be auto-retried. I would have to tell my phone again. It didn't remember.
I added one-touch "Home" and "Work" Google Maps widgets to my home screen and never looked back.
As an engineer, I realize why this is a tricky problem. As a consumer, I want it to "just work".
It took me months to work out that "navigate to X" was the magic phrase to get google maps to do what you would expect in car navigation to do. The phrase that came more naturally to me was "give me directions to X", but that only gets you to the screen with the route and you still have to manually press the "start" button with your finger. And then it would randomly pick other modes of transport unless I remember to say "by car". Systems that are inherently unrecoverable like voice commands need actual documentation.
Not the OP, but many people use Waze etc for driving directions on everyday commute because the same destination does not imply the same route - due to construction, accidents, traffic jams, etc the best route can vary significantly, and simply driving the same route as yesterday can take much more time than it did yesterday.
At the start of my morning commute, I would say, "Ok Google, navigate to work".
Often, this would fail because I was in the network limbo area outside my house, where my phone struggles to transition from home WiFi to data.
Worst of all: The failure would be horribly slow. I would have to drive for another 30s before my phone realized, yes, we are really out of WiFi range now. And the voice command wouldn't be auto-retried. I would have to tell my phone again. It didn't remember.
I added one-touch "Home" and "Work" Google Maps widgets to my home screen and never looked back.
As an engineer, I realize why this is a tricky problem. As a consumer, I want it to "just work".