Point of interest name (voice command)

My Nav is an older version than yours (probably, anyway, no idea what you've got up North), but it's probably similar enough for me to take a stab at answering...

...anyway, welcome to state-of-the-1990's voice recognition technology! It can only recognize words in a select, limited vocabulary. Just because it knows how to spell the name of the restaurant doesn't mean it knows what it sounds like, or how to recognize it when you speak it. There are few enough POI categories that it's easy to program it to recognize them all, and it's not likely to confuse one for another due to the sizable differences between recognizing "restaurant" and "gas station". The number of individual business names is much larger than the car is capable of handling. Modern voice recognition (like you might find on your smartphone, or *maybe* a luxury car) is a lot better than that.

 

I don't have a "v", I don't know the difference in voice command capabilities and I'm certainly no expert. In our 2014 Four I simply say "find next <brand name>". If I say "find next restaurant", it tells me to specify the brand name anyway. Nowhere do I get any prompt to specify a city. For me, the problem is the Prius seems to limit voice commands to national brands and doesn't recognize locals, or at least no all that are in its database. For example, while near Cody WY, I asked it to find "Granny's Restaurant". It correctly recognized what I said but couldn't find it. So, I stopped and entered the name manually and there it was. When we got there, I tried using voice commands again and it still couldn't find it. I suppose it's possible it couldn't correlate the spoken Granny's to the typed g-r-a-n-n-y-s, but that seems odd since it never has a problem with national brands.

 

No doubt Toyota could enhance the Prius nav system, but all they really need to do is get rid of the lockouts they've imposed while the vehicle is moving so a passenger could work the system manually. Personally, I think the voice commands should simply work the menu system and not be limited to a subset. I'm actually surprised it doesn't do that. I already had a Garmin, so I use that to search for POIs, etc., and then I use voice commands to enter the address because I like the audio directions integrated in the audio system. Given the cost of upgrading maps, I expect I'll always keep the Garmin and use it alongside the Prius system.