Phone dial pad deactivates & No Connection Voice Assist v9.24

My Venu 3 is updated to latest non-beta version and works well including voice assistant to Pixel 7, making and answering calls.  But, periodically, and I haven't found the cause as yet, the Phone dial on the watch app shows deactivated.  When I see this, I now know that an attempt at the Voice Assistant will show "No Phone Connection".  Only cure that I have found so far is to shut off and re-start the watch.  This brings back the dial pad on the watch's phone app and re-enables the Voice Assistant.  I've tried cycling Bluetooth on my phone, but this did not work.

The watch is otherwise full-time connected to my phone and synchs with the Connect App without any problems, including when "No Phone Connection" pops up when triggering the voice assistant or tapping on the disabled dial pad in the phone app. 

  • Thought this issue might be due to going out of range of my phone and then an incomplete recovery upon coming back in phone Bluetooth range.  Certainly the deactivated dialpad and "no connection" are expected when out of range, but this has recovered each time I am back in range.  The one constant has been the persistent failure for several mornings now after sleep wakeup.  Have to Power Off and restart to fix.

  • This does seem to be an issue with the phone being out of BT range, in my case while sleeping.  The watch does re-connect enabling notifications and synch with Garmin Connect, but the Venu 3 Phone app shows the line thru the dialpad icon, correctable only via powering the watch off and on.  Now, after 2 nights with my Pixel 7 nearby, this has not happened.

  • I now notice that when my Pixel 7 top drop-down bubble for Bluetooth shows "Bluetooth" rather than "UAT-4260", my Venu 3 Phone App will have the dialpad deactivated [slash thru icon] and Voice Assist will not connect.  Still, the only fix is to Power Off and Restart the Venu 3.  Then, the Pixel 7 indicates "UAT-4260" and everything works fine.