Why has my 7x pro started giving me audio prompts for nav. And how can I get rid of these?

Indeed, it’s such an annoying bug. Every time I go for a trail run—usually alone in the early morning—I hear a voice behind me, and it scares the crap out of me. I have to stop, dig my iPhone out of a deep pocket, and turn the volume all the way down.

Garmin-Laurie said:

While our engineers are still collecting examples of this concern to track customer's experience with this

Maybe these engineers could directly visit these threads written  about it. They will get a good grasp about the customers’ experience.

Five months Garmin-Laurie said: Our engineers are aware of an issue causing audio prompts for navigation to sounds, when audio prompts are disabled. This concern has been escalated, to hopefully find a solution for this soon.  

And 2 days ago Garmin-Laurie says: there have not been any announcements around any plans for this to be changed.

It is quite interesting how bugs and regressions are left unresolved.

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

Maybe these engineers could directly visit these threads written  about it. They will get a good grasp about the customers’ experience

Not engineers but managers. From what I've read so far from multiple sources, Garmin organization is very top down and engineers don't make any decisions.

But what Garmin needs most of all is real beta testing where people are purposely test any new software changes and features in the field and can provide a quality feedback directly to whoever works on the features. These must be people who understand how these features are used by typical users and who have attention to details, and who can communicate efficiently. Beta testers should be selected into this job and rewarded. Having random people who install beta builds and support personnel in the middle of the communication chain breaks the whole model of beta testing because support people are usually clueless about subtle details (based on my experience) and most people who participate in the beta program are poor beta testers. 

I vote they do a team bonding exercise, where the engineers visit a forest with a load of tracks for a day. They then have to use the voice prompts that they can't deactivate on their Fenix 7x watch. I bet it would be pretty incredible how quickly they manage to come up with a fix. 

Meine Fenix ​​​​​​​​7x Saphir Solar ist für mich seit knapp 4 Monaten unbrauchbar.

Anfang Oktober begannen die fehlerhaften Updates und es wurde immer schlimmer.

Da die Garantie abgelaufen ist, hat man mir die gleiche Uhr im Austausch mit einer Zuzahlung von 250,-€ angeboten. Was soll ich mit der gleichen Uhr tun, wenn sie durch Updates unbrauchbar wird?

Außerdem hat man mir eine Fenix ​​​​​​​​8 mit 7% Nachlass im Austausch angeboten. 

Garmin, was soll das?

silentvoyager said:

I suspect the reason we don't see a fix for this is because on Fenix 8 these audio settings are now in focus modes, and I suspect some of the code is shared between Fenix 7 and Fenix 8,

You know you are probably right.

I was thinking about it quite a lot and even if sometimes it seems to be attractive to get some new features to your watch, but it would be really better if watches shoudl stay at the level of knowledge they had when they were announced.

Otherwise the result is a full chaos as we can observe it and get hurt from it. This mix that you suspect in audio prompt issue goes nowhere just chaos and furor from users.

If the products are thoroughly designed considering both hardware constraints and marketing aspects before their releases in vitro, that is WITHOUT playing with the nerves of customers, then it makes no sense to tear down the wall of this robust construction with vague ideas being tested later in vivo,  playing with the nerves of customers…

I simply mean it is a fair deal if one gets zero feature later, but an almost bug free watch after a couple of rounds of bug fixing.

I wish what you said was true, but based on my experience owning Fenix 6 and Fenix 7, Garmin regularly uses previous versions of their products as test grounds for future versions. For example, they very likely had some preproduction versions of Epix 2 and Fenix 7 when working on Fenix 8, where most of the new features were kept from public releases but most of the internal components were shared. A good evidence of that is Fenix E which is hardware wise it's exactly the same as non-pro Epix 2. Basically it is rebranded Epix 2 with a new software.

I've seen many examples when their features had changed not in the best way after the release or had been plain broken, and they absolutely never rolled it back. For example, I really loved the minimal implementation of touch when Fenix 7 was originally released - it applied only in a few areas like map and navigation where it really mattered on an adventure watch. But later they started to force the touch everywhere, whether that makes sense or not, in a way that makes it pretty much unusable in an environment where Fenix is supposed to be used (like wet sleeves touching the screen), and often very rarely used functions end up hurting usability of commonly used functions. It is really bizarre that the watch would reconfigure data screens on its own just because there is some rain and sleeves of my jacket touched the screen. Who thought that was a good idea? How often users really want to reconfigure data screens with touch in a middle of a run? All you need is touch the screen and hold for one second. And the map-only touch option does not really work, and Garmin doesn't bother fixing it probably because relatively few users use it or even aware of it. So what we have now is the feature that was great at release but no longer usable for someone like me. I pretty much have to disable touch even though it is a feature that I paid for and that makes the screen readability worse.

I could go on with more examples like that.

silentvoyager said:

And the map-only touch option does not really work, and Garmin doesn't bother fixing it probably because relatively few users use it or even aware of it.

I use  map only, and also a hot key for touch, but could not figure out exactly which setting overrides the other and when.

i agree without you, nevertheless the only additional occasions when I like the touch is renaming of sensors or glance folders. But not any other example I have in my mind.

The only functions that I am pleased with now compared to earlier versions is the categorization of backlight settings and the separation of dnd, battery saver and sleep mode. Both were much worse when they first popped up on Fenixes.