ChatGPT in CarPlay reads footnotes aloud, then falls apart mid-drive
A Polish journalist tried ChatGPT and Perplexity by voice on a drive from Tarnow to Warsaw. One read footnotes aloud and glitched, the other cut him off constantly.
SUMO· the number puzzle
Dialo· learn languages by speaking
ediviewer· read EDI files like documents
giftdetect· the right gift in minutesThe drive from Tarnow to Warsaw takes three to four hours, mostly staring at bumpers on the S7. A Spider's Web journalist used to fight the boredom by chatting with an AI bot. Using ChatGPT in CarPlay, he says, that no longer works.
His question was simple: from which model year does Toyota fit adaptive cruise control as standard, even on the cheapest trim levels? The bot gave rough dates at first, but only for three models: Yaris, Corolla and C-HR. Toyota has ten or twelve in its range, so he asked for more. That's where it went wrong.
What goes wrong with ChatGPT in CarPlay?
He pays for the higher ChatGPT tier (he says he gets it free through Revolut). Even so, the voice mode started reading footnotes and sources aloud, dropping lines like "note from XYZ" into the middle of Polish sentences. By the third or fourth question it stuttered, chopped words and switched languages mid-sentence. He switched it off. In his words, it felt like having a passenger in medical distress.
Perplexity in the car: a hundred broken chats
He moved to Perplexity, hoping to dictate a few thoughts. Its voice capture decided he had finished after a second or two, reset the microphone and answered half a sentence. At a stop, he found roughly a hundred chat threads in his history, each holding one or two cut-off words.
Gemini isn't an option on his CarPlay setup either, apart from a bot button inside Google Maps. Apple's system, he says, keeps Google's voice assistant at arm's length on the car screen.
He says a plain voice recorder would have worked better, followed by on-device transcription in MacWhisper on iOS. CarPlay has no such recorder. His next step is to repeat the trip with Android Auto and see how Gemini copes. Until then, he's back to Apple Music, or phoning relatives.
Apps worth a look
SUMO: the number puzzleTap the right tiles, add them up, hit the target. Easy to learn, hard to master. Free, for all ages.
Dialo: learn languages by speakingTalk to an AI conversation partner; every sentence comes back corrected and explained in your language. 9 languages, A1 to C2.
ediviewer: read EDI files like documentsOpen EDIFACT and X12 messages, see every segment explained, convert to JSON/XML, export PDF and Excel. Runs locally, no upload.
giftdetect: the right gift in minutesPick who it is for, the occasion and their personality. The search engine reads product descriptions from local shops and ranks what fits. Free, no sign-up.
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