Not sure if anyone else is experiencing this. The Voice Command feature does not work. I will say, whisper, or shout a command at the watch and it will just hang on “Listening” and not attempt to process any voice input.
Similarly, the Phone Assistant is very hit or miss, mostly miss.
What’s even weirder - when using either feature, after doing nothing, my phone will resume playback of whatever was paused at the time. For example, if I was listening to a podcast in Pocket Casts, I attempt to use Voice Command (which doesn’t work), it will somehow instruct my phone to resume the podcast, so my phone starts playing it. I’m not sure how or why the Voice Command feature would involve the phone at all, let alone instruct it to do something I didn’t ask it to do (resume playback). Often, when invoking the Phone Assistant, it will do the same thing - playing whatever media was active at the time - instead of activating Siri.
I assume this will eventually get polished via software updates, but in the meantime this is a relentlessly clunky and not useful set of features. It’s probably unfair to put this against an Apple Watch with first-party private API access, but the fit and finish is beyond comparison.
The voice notes feature at least indicates that the watch microphone is working and it plays back what I consider to be intelligible American English speech, and I’ve restarted everything and am running the latest firmware (11.90).
