As soon as I took off from an audiophile society party on Saturday evening in my 2026 Toyota Prius, I noticed that the left half of the speedometer screen was taken up by a large microphone icon.
I pressed the "return" button on the steering wheel, and it went away for about 2 seconds, but then it came right back.
No matter how many times I tried to press the return button, or any of the other buttons on the right side of the steering wheel, or hold them down, the microphone would not go away and stay away. I noticed that sometimes when the microphone was bouncing back, there was also a little red warning/error icon that appeared and/or blinked for about a half second.
As long as I didn't obsess about this too much, it wasn't really a problem driving my car home. (Though a few times, as I was driving on side streets, I did almost obsess too much.). The speedometer was moved slightly to the right, but still perfectly useable.
When I had finally stopped the car, I noticed that the microphone icon essentially made it impossible to use the "menus" on the left side of the speedometer display (which are controlled by the buttons on the left side of the steering wheel). So for example I couldn't disable or enable the various warning or semi-automatic driving features (some of which I actually find useful, others I have turned off).
There do appear to be DIY instructions online about how to fix such problems. There is a checklist of about 7 different things that you can do which might make the microphone go away, ending up with disconnecting the Prius battery. (I hope I don't have to do that, and if I get to that point, I'm probably going to the dealer first.)
I already went through a process of disabling voice to text conversion completely and permanently on my phone. I was endlessly pressing the tiny microphone button on the right side of the text entry box of the messages app by accident. It's very hard not to press it when you are trying to add one more word to the text, for example. My (relatively small for a guy) fingers are too big AND I don't think these screens have as much touch resolution as you might hope either. Often times it takes a serious effort to press tiny buttons in the upper left corner of the screen, for example.
Several times after I pressed the Messages app microphone button by mistake, the text entry box filled up with mumbles, curses and radio announcements in an incoherent and possibly defamatory screed I almost sent by mistake to my girlfriend. That got me motivated to figure out how to turn off all speech-to-text conversion permanently on my phone, and that is going to be my plan from now on, though I expect I'm going to have to endlessly keep on figuring out how to turn these things off as updates and changes keep turning them back on again.
I care more about accidents like that happening that the theoretical possibility that someone somewhere is listening to me through the speech-to-text conversion system, or using it to train AI. But there's that too. I feel it's worth the extra effort to use my fingers encode exactly the words, phrases, and punctuation I want rather than to have words encoded that I never meant to be.
Just after I stopped the car at a supermarket, I tried turning off the Bluetooth on my phone. That has helped with some issues sometimes, like when the car stole the audio from my phone's navigation system, and wasn't playing it either. I hadn't enabled or even heard of CarPlay then, since then I've deliberately used CarPlay to capture the audio from the phone navigation and that works ok. So I did have bluetooth turned on. And now I figured that might have been what the problem was, somehow my phone was messing with the car. But the microphone still stayed stuck after I turned my phone off. Then I stopped my car for 10 seconds then started it again and the microphone was still there. Then I stopped my car and went shopping for 45 minutes. When I restarted the car, now with Bluetooth having been off for 45 minutes...I still got the microphone.
*****
After hours of Google searching, watching videos, and reading Reddit columns, I decided almost certainly the problem was that I needed to reboot my phone, because some phone app was advertising itself as a "microphone" on Bluetooth. That should have been obvious too from the fact that I first experienced this issue at an audio party where I was using apps on my phone such as RTA and oscilloscope. (Though, curiously, those apps don't seem to have access to Bluetooth.). The problem also seemed to coincide with a tiny orange dot that appeared in the upper window of the phone. That tiny orange dot didn't disappear until the phone was deeply into the OFF stage, it was the very last thing to let go.
With all the endless security paranoia, it all comes to naught once two devices are both registered with each other on Bluetooth. Then apps that you don't expect may take over and do weird things on attached devices, as I experienced. Bluetooth seems to fit it's name, it's something of a pirate like Cap'n Bluetooth. Once you let that pirate onto the ship, there's no telling what will happen. There's no real "task" control, there's nobody in charge, it's a Bluetooth pirate ship. Furthermore, if Cap'n Bluetooth issues some illegal or improper order, perhaps just interrupted or otherwise not completely intelligible, there may be no way to remand it. You have have to throw everything overboard and start all over.* I pity the people who've gone down the checklist I first got from Google--ultimately having to disconnect the battery which they recommend having a dealer do--fortunately the 'problem' for me wasn't in my car at all but in the way the car was reacting to inappropriate apps on my phone. But apparently a lot of apps may have a similar issue, and people may use those apps a lot, leading to issues like mine.
I was tempted to remove my Bluetooth access permanently on the Prius. But the next day I finally figured out how to get CarPlay to run on my car showing maps on screen and even giving pointers on the "instrument display" that has the speedometer. That's a useful thing to have Bluetooth for (although a USB cable might work as well). So for now, I'm going to keep Bluetooth enabled even knowing it will occasionally do weird things. Or if it happens again, I might start disabling bluetooth and using a USB cable instead. I know other people who do that.
Further, in order to use CarPlay, I had to turn Siri on. I don't really see any reason why CarPlay needs to use Siri. But it does. I enabled Siri so that it starts with a side button press, NOT "Hello Siri" or some such phrase, which it might think it hears as part of some other speech or media.
What I'd also really like to do is disable "Remote Start" on the Toyota app. I now live in constant fear that I might start my car by accident when it's parked in the garage. I've searched through the Setup on my Toyota Infotainment Screen and at first brush it seems the only way to do this is to visit the Dealer, and even that might not do what I want: keep the remote door locking but not the remote start.
*It's also damned annoying that it takes some effort to "quit" apps on an iPhone...and Mac's too. You can't just close an app, you have to go through several fancy swiping moves to shut off any app. Back in the day before Mac polluted GUI's with their limited ideas, real GUI's like X Window System generally had two kinds of close buttons on every window, so you could either close an app (like quitting it) or 'suspend' it which kept it running and it turned into an icon. The close button was on one end of the title bar, and the suspend button on the other end. The Unix command line interface was like this too. Normally when you exited from an app, or summarily terminated it with Control-C, it was no longer running. To "background" an app, you use Control-Z. Now the default is just to keep everything running unless you take a lot of extra steps, which is often confounding if not an utter waste of resources.
Speaking of which, the Toyota app on iPhone is itself damned annoying because you can easily find yourself on a page which seems to have no way of exiting from if you happen to go there by mistake. The only such choice you may seem to have is "logging off" which it advises you not to do if you try. So lots of times I've had to suspend the app (swipe up), then bring up all suspended apps (swipe up again), and then terminate the stuck Toyota app (swipe up again).
RULE #1: THERE SHOULD ALWAYS BE A BACK BUTTON.
It's also galling that when using the Safari browser on iPhone the "back" button disappears once you have started scrolling down the page. You are always obligated to scroll back to the top of the page before you can use the back button. And then it seems you can't easily terminate that Safari instance (the way you might close a Chrome tab on a Mac anyway) and go back to the previous one. You have to select a page showing all Safari instances, and then terminate the ones you don't want from that page.
The most egregious example is when you press on the VIN at the top of most pages. This brings up the Vehicle page for that particular Toyota vehicle. It has 3 obvious buttons, + (add a new vehicle), Remove Vehicle (no, I don't want to do that, who knows how hard it will be to get it back on), and Select. Select would be the obvious choice, it would seem I could simply Select the vehicle I've already selected and just move on. But the Select button is de-selected. Pressing it does nothing if you haven't added or selected another vehicle. So you remain stuck on the Vehicle page with no way of getting off the Vehicle page other than suspending the app (swipe up), bringing up all suspended apps (swipe up again), and then terminate the Toyota app (swipe up again), and open the Toyota app all over again if you still had more to do with it.
But now I see that near the top of the Vehicle page, just above where it says "Vehicles", there is a very faint grey bar that looks almost like a hyphen. It is very very faint on my phone (and with my vision). Actually, it's not a hyphen, there's a bend in the middle so it points almost imperceptibly downward. Ahah, that's the "Back" button, because the Vehicle page envisions itself as some kind of scroll down page, and there's a larger and more obvious down arrow just underneath the VIN on the other app pages.
So, the notion seems to be that the Vehicle select page scrolls down from any other window so you can select a different car. Then once you have selected the car, you should scroll back up the Vehicle selection page. Except the almost illegible, nearly invisible, arrow on the Vehicle page also points down, instead of more logically pointing up. Maybe that makes sense somehow, if you can actually see the tiny glyph and realize that it is intended to be an arrow.
I could go on and on like this about every app on the phone, although I think the Toyota app is the absolute most confusing and confounding of all.
Over time, all the iphone apps become larded with more and more tiny buttons it's far too easy to press (or bars to shift) by accident, or completely ignore, and auxiliary screens with mysterious protocols where you may end up. Where once Apple meant simple (like the one button mouse, which was a bit too simple actually, two buttons are the clear minimum requirement) now Apple seems to mean feature-itis to the max, just as much as the other guys, and just as difficult (and sometimes even more obscure) to navigate. Rather than simplicity, it now means obscurity.
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