Is there anybody out there that is happy with the TCH voice recognition performance? I find it unbelievably bad! it continuously comes up with ludicrous responses to the most straightforward command! The whole thing seems to be a joke! An example would be when entering a phone number it frequently enters a zero when I say 4. Admittedly I have an English accent but my wife has the same problem and she has a Canadian accent.
I also have a cell phone with voice recognition, (Motorola RAZR), I have no voice recognition problems with it.

I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software to dictate these messages so know what current voice recognition programs are capable of.

There is an adjustment on microphone sensitivity that the dealer can do for you. Maybe try that.

I have a non-navigation car, and do dial by number all the time. I have had no problems at all with recognition of numbers or commands. I have a fairly USA neutral, slightly-southern accent.

I have never seen a voice recognition in a car that has worked good. I hate the TCH voice recognition, I find myself spending more time doing the command than it would take to just grab the phone and do it. My dad has a number of GM vehicles with the onstar, and I keep making fun of him when he tries to dial by voice.

Him "Dial home"

Car "Photon torpedos armed"

Him (in a stern voice) "Dial home"

Car "nuclear reactor on"

Him (yelling now) "Dial Home"

Car "Deathstar activated"

Voice reconition does nothing more than aggrivate the user.

LOL and still LOL.. pretty funny. I agree 100% After trying unsuccessfully, many times and getting aggrivated, I finally gave up on the voice activation. It's much easier to just use the override and dial by touch.
Still laughing...

This is my second time around with this voice recognition; it was the same system in my '05 RX 330, and it sucks. One thing I learned early on with the one in the RX 330, which is true with this one, is that it has a hard time with deep male voices. When I try to speak in a higher octave, the "hit rate" improves. There are some novelty commands I've perfected to show off the system, but in day-to-day use I never use voice recognition.

And my cell phone is with Sprint, so I added Sprint's Voice Command voice dialing back when I first got the RX 330. I put the voice dial command, an asterisk, in the first speed dial button, and use that to get to the Sprint system. The voice dialing using Voice Command works just fine with the handsfree setup in the Camry, as it did in my RX 330.

"When you get to the fork in the road, take it." --Yogi Berra

TCH's voice recognition isn't adaptive like Dragon Naturally Speaking so it's going to be more affected by accent. I really don't use the voice commands but the few times I used it, I've been pleasantly surprised by its utility. My main problem with it is that it makes even a simple task tediously long. For example, in order to set NAVi to home, you have to press the talk button, wait through the instruction and the beep, say "home" and then wait through another set of instructions and beep, and say "enter destination."

I only had to make two adjustments:
1. When dialing by number, I no longer pause when speaking the numbers.
Instead of 931-555-8090, I just say "9315558090".
2. When dialing by name, I had to make some names into 2 syllables:
Instead of recording, "bob", I recorded "call bob".
Both seem to work flawlessly on my non-nav TCH.

Oh my, you had me rolling on the floor. That would make a fantastic little video. Especially as they pan to the back seat and find you crouched down with one of those radio based kareoke microphones.

Pulse & Gliding in Claremont

I've given up using the NAV voice commands.
The CLIMATE commands are impossible too. (just a joke)
I have found that the command "Dial By Number" and then (after the prompt if prompting is on) giving the phone number you want to dial moderately quickly/no pauses between digits works (so far) 100% of the time for phone dialing.

I gave it a try but could not get my car to arm the photon torpedoes. As we all know firing unarmed torpedoes may scare someone momentarily, but just watch out for their response when they find out they're unarmed.

What's the sense in providing photon torpedoes that can't be armed? As you can well imagine I'm pretty upset about this and plan on sending a scathing letter to Toyota national and regional.