Waze and Nexus4

vlee

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I have Waze (navigation) on my phone and up until a month ago, I didn't have any problems with it. It's set up to play thru the phone's speaker; I tried early on to get it to go thru Bluetooth to the car radio, but couldn't figure it out. I have a 2011 Hyundai Tucson, if that matters.

About a month ago (in retrospect, I can't remember if it was before or after the 4.3 upgrade) I started having a problem with the volume being so low it was all but impossible to hear directions, but reinstalling fixed that. Now it no longer gives full directions - for example it used to say something like in .5 miles turn right and as I got closer would tell me to turn right on Alabama Street. Now now it will abruptly blurt turn right and nothing else. And when it's time to turn, it'll say the street name, but not the whole name; it's like "bama street".

I was about to get a new nav program when something interesting happened yesterday. I was making a Bluetooth call and, just as I came up on a turn, the voice (sounds like a different voice) gave me the "in .x many feet, turn right on ..." through the radio. And after I ended the call, it went back to either no or truncated prompts. So apparently it would work with Bluetooth, but I don't know how to make it work all of the time, unless I'm actually on an active call. I see there are several Bluetooth settings, but I can't tell what the differences are. Right now "phone audio" and "media audio" are checked. And Waze has a "play through phone speaker, which I've tried both ways. I've even changed the Waze "voice" to see if one of them had a broken vocabulary.

Since it only "speaks" when I'm driving, and I drive alone, it's really hard to test out various settings. So, I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction to get this working again? I don't have strong feelings about whether it goes through the radio or the phone speaker . I just want it to give me complete directions again.
 

Captainbob767

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I can't help you with Waze (of which there seems to be several versions; which are you using?), but if you want to try something else, give Scout a go. It's been around forever under its former name, TeleNav and works perfectly with my Nexus 4 even with the latest updates.

https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...m.telenav.app.android.scout_us&token=AWkxwLML

I use Waze and it blows the other nav apps away. You get real time advice from other drivers in your area, in fact it is so good, Google paid a Billion dollars for it.
 

vlee

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Re: Waze and Nexus4 - Making some progress

After a fair amount of trial and error,I now have full directions via the phone's speaker. I tinkered with several combinations, but from what I can tell now, the Bluetooth setting/profile on the phone needs to be - media audio unchecked, phone audio checked. And on the Waze side, I had to set Sound to "play sound to phone speaker" being unchecked. That last one was definitely not intuitive... if I want the sound to play through my speaker, why wouldn't that need to be checked, but so far, checking that seems to disable the speaker sound. (I don't do music on the phone, so I am likely not understanding the media settings).

What is odd is that even when most directions are not going through the speaker, minimal instructions still do (eg turn left, and the partial street names). It's like the program has two vocabularies and can't always figure which one to use.

Now next puzzle, should anyone want to tackle it. How would I get the directions to play through the radio speaker via Bluetooth? Since it did do that the one time that I happened to be on a call, it seems like it "should" be possible.

I agree with Captbob that Waze is a good app. The multiple participants submit reports on various conditions, such as road construction, police, accidents etc, and the system also figures out issues such as average speed on a particular road. It has some quirks, but works reasonably well. (Now if only they would just get rid of the pop-up ads!). I do appreciate the suggestion for an alternative, though.

Thanks for any help; the Waze support board doesn't seem as friendly as this one and some of the posters scare me :-\.

BTW, in case anyone else stumbles on this during a search, what I finally did to test it out was set up a destination to the south and then head north. Waze was beside itself trying to reroute me at every intersection, so lots of opportunities to test out the settings. Of course I had to pull over to make the changes while I was driving through a nearby neighborhood and I'm surprised someone didn't report me for casing houses!
 

auspilot

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Re: Waze and Nexus4 - Making some progress

Thanks for this post, vlee. I have been beating my head against a wall trying to get Waze to work again after the 4.3 upgrade. I drive two cars; one has bluetooth, the other doesn't and that's the one I drive most often. I didn't even realize the settings you tweaked exist! I'll play around with them and hopefully be able to get Waze working in both cars.

As an aside, this issue has been discussed on a Waze forum, *and* entered as an issue on the Waze bug list. I can't believe it hasn't been addressed in the latest release!
 

mwpflug

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Re: Waze and Nexus4 - Making some progress

My wife's car has factory standard Bluetooth that only works for phone calls and not media or other audio output. She has to run a cable from the headphone jack to the car's AUX jack to get audio through the car speakers. The other alternative is to install an aftermarket Bluetooth solution that can handle both types of audio. Your car might be similar.
 

vlee

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Re: Waze and Nexus4 - Making some progress

She has to run a cable from the headphone jack to the car's AUX jack to get audio through the car speakers.

Ohhhh. I was getting suspicious of that "media" setting. I know my car (Hyundai) came with some special sort of ipod cable, I'm not sure why it was special; I just remember the sales person saying not to lose it, so it's buried somewhere at the bottom of my center console. I assume it wouldn't work with my phone anyhow! If that is what the problem is, it sounds like too much of a hassle to try to run Waze through Bluetooth for my short work commutes. Maybe I'll look into it if I have to make a longer trip. This car was my first one with Bluetooth, so it was a mystery to me; I guess I just assumed that anything playing on the phone would automagically play through the car speakers. Thanks for adding a piece to the puzzle.

Oh, and auspilot - I'm glad my experience helped. I hate when people post a problem and disappear, leaving me wondering if they ever solved it, particularly when I have the same issue.
 

auspilot

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Re: Waze and Nexus4 - Making some progress

This is what I found with my Nexus 4 on android 4.3: I'm driving my non-bluetooth car, and the phone's bluetooth is turned off. If I have the option "play sound to phone speaker" checked, I get the truncated prompts (just the last few words) through the phone's speaker. Unacceptable. If I uncheck the box, the prompts play just fine *through the phone's speaker*! Go figure.

As an aside, I also accidentally found that if the box is checked (and so prompts are truncated), then if I answer a phone call, the prompts play correctly through the earpiece (interrupting my caller if he's talking). Bizarre...
 

rxter

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Apr 21, 2014
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Thanks so much for this post. I was having same problem with SG3/ Turned off the "play sound to phone speaker" and now it works fine. More than just non-intuitive. Downright stupid.
 

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