Music Search Bug in CarPlay

[James7x1]

There is an ongoing issue with Siri's voice command API in CarPlay that I've identified and have an open case with Apple to resolve. When a user triggers Siri and verbally requests Spotify action or enters the Spotify app and hits the Search->Ask Siri to play music button, Spotify invokes Siri; however, Siri does not pass the Spotify app the words spoken verbatim. Siri re-interprets the name of the song, artist, album, etc. which leads to the feature not working unless Siri identifies the queried info. I have observed this with Apple Music and Apple Maps as well. The issue only occurs when using CarPlay and has been observed on iPhone 13 and iPhone 15 Pro and in multiple vehicle manufacturers and models. The issue is not mic quality since voice texting transcribes perfectly verbatim.

An example of the issue is requesting Siri to play "all of me all of you just take my hand", in which Siri does not recognize it as lyrics from "From the Ground Up" by Dan+Shay and instead passes in "All of Me" as the request to the search bar. Another example is "Where Have You Gone" which it doesn't recognize as a song by Alan Jackson and instead passes the last requested song to the Spotify search bar or substitutes a seemingly random set of words.

The Spotify community can help by observing if the issue occurs for you and then reporting it to Apple. Spotify can help by switching the search feature to call Siri's transcription API instead of the general request API.

Plan

Premium

Country

U.S.

Device

iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 13

Operating System

iOS 18.6.2

[Joan]

Hi there @James7x1,

Thanks for reaching out and for providing all of this detailed information.

We'll happily pass your feedback onto the appropriate team. Be advised however that we cannot say for certain at the moment when or if this is going to get implemented. In the meantime, if you get any valuable updates from our colleagues at Apple, do let us know!

We also have this thread about a very similar issue. Check it out and feel free to contribute to the discussion. We still keep our eyes on it so any further info is always appreciated. If however the issue you have is significantly different, let us know so we can look into this further.

Let us know if there's anything else we can do for you.

[James7x1]

Thanks Joan,

I'll update here if I'm able to make any progress. Hopefully, other users will chime in here if they observe the issue as well. The example prompts should be reproducible if folks would like to give that a try. It's been a massive pain when driving long hours and not being able to search for music without picking up my phone.

[JpDiah]

Hey there. I’m experiencing the very same issue. The vocal search function while using Apple CarPlay is useless, and it’s pretty much the only one, unless I take up my iPhone and manually search while driving, which is exactly the reason why Siri was created… I wonder if Android works better?

[James7x1]

I just recently switched from a Samsung Galaxy S22 running Android, and the search feature in Spotify allowed typing when stopped, or when driving, voice dictation or Google Assistant commands.

Really wish Spotify would have it not call Siri and instead do voice transcription like on Android.