Focus Mode recurring voice alert pauses audio

On my runs I have voice alerts set up for each lap (mile) to provide the lap pace, and Focus Mode recurring voice alerts set up to give average pace, heart rate, average power.  I also listen to audiobooks from Audible on my phone while I am running.

The recent firmware update made the Focus Mode voice alerts work again after being totally broken in the previous version, but now they appear to pause the audiobooks every time they trigger.  This does not happen on the lap voice alerts, in those cases the audio pauses while the voice does it's thing then automatically starts again.  For Focus Mode voice alerts, the audio pauses and does not start again.

I can restart by pressing play on the watch or via my headphones, but it is quite annoying having to do this every 5 minutes on say a 2 hour run.  This behaviour is also new.  Previous versions of recurring voice alerts worked fine (barring the previous version), so it seems to be a change in feature (which Im guessing is not the case, it would be very odd and unwanted behaviour from a running watch), a bug, or me

Has anyone else come across something similar or have any ideas whether it is a setting I have missed or something?

  • Running while away from home the other day I noticed the issue is quite a bit worse than noted above.  When using voice prompts on a course with turn by turn audible instructions, every single voice prompt causes Audible to pause.  When running around towns with many turns that means you end up having to faff around with the watch/earphones to unpause every couple of minutes, in effect not practically useable.

    Obviously not many suffering this issue, but we are talking about Audible here.. The same issue does not rise for e.g Spotify, but that app is no good really for audio books.. Audible is by far the most used audiobook app out there,... Runners listening to audio books will likely be using it.  Garmin quite often borks it's compatibility with Audible over several devices and takes an age to fix the issue  so it is clean no testing occurs at all