The problem is in remembering the voice commands. I could never do it. Word the command slightly “wrong” and it won’t work at all (at least not in my 2014 VW).
I’m optimistic that the latest progress in AI will fix this when the technology matures in cars. I reckon this is still a decade away though.
Honestly, other than that one single command ("Climate control defrost and floor") I never really use voice for anything else while actively driving. The temperature knob usually does what I want when driving, and I'll be stopped again soon enough if I want to fiddle with something else.
And that one voice command is easy-enough to remember, and the resulting manually-selected mode is easy-enough to cancel with the Auto button (which is the entire middle of the temperature knob -- simple enough).
AI is too easy to get wrong.
For example: At home when my hands are full and I'm headed to/from the basement, I might bark out the command "Alexa! Basement lights!"
This command sometimes results turning the lights on or off. But sometimes, it results in entering a conversation about the basement lights, when all anyone really wants from such simple diction is for the lights to toggle state -- like interacting with a regular light switch just toggles state.
I simply want computers to follow instructions. I am very particularly disinterested in ever having conversation -- a negotiation -- with a computer in my car.
But I can see plenty of merit to adding some context-aware tolerance for ambiguity to the accepted commands. Different people sometimes (quite rightly) use different words to describe the end result they want.
That doesn't take an LLM to accomplish, I don't think. After all, a car has a limited number of functions. It should be mostly a matter of broadening the voice recognition dictionary and expanding the fixed logic to deal with that breadth.
I reckon that this should have happened 5 years ago. :)