Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Remember the Scene in Star Trek 4: "Save the Whales"

Where Scotty impresses the engineer in 20th century San Francisco, then blows it all picking up the mouse and assuming the computer will take voice instructions?  (Interesting trivia, you never see all of James Doohan's fingers in Star Trek.  One was blown off during D-Day.  Greatest Generation where you least expect them.)

The more controls you have that are operated by switches that are a reach to get, the riskier it is. So, as an experiment,  I hit the voice button on the steering wheel and said "Turn off air conditioning."  it did.  "Set temperature to 70 degrees."  It did.  "Turn on driver's seat heater."  Yay!  It does not seem to understand,  "Turn on driver's seat massager."  To change the 33-inch wide dash to show the full navigation map, "Show map" works.  I still have not figured out how to command it show the radio display.  There is a button on the console to do that, but the obvious,  "Show radio" or "Show YouTube music" seems to tell YouTube Music to start playing some song other than the one that was already playing.  There must be a manual that shows all the Cadillac Customer User Experience (CUE) commands.  I just need to hunt it down.

UPDATE: Thanks to all you Trekkies that remembered Save the Wheels was 4 no 2 to save us from the giant Hostess Ho-Hos.

5 comments:

  1. It was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, but you're right about the memorability of that scene. I think most fans my age suspected we'd live to see technology like that. I now have regular voice conversations with various AIs.

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  2. That was Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home.

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  3. Start Trek 4: The Voyage Home. Understandable as 1 and 3 were completely forgettable. (Even numbered Star Trek Movies don't suck)

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  4. It's a source of great amusement to me that my car understands my speech with pretty high accuracy, but does not understand my British wife's speech at all.

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  5. I recently had to replace my car, and the new one, same model but six years later, has many improvements but some negatives. I have 6000+ songs on a thumb drive and the old car could access them all, but the new one stops indexing at just under 5000. You can select songs by naming them, but it's VERY spotty.

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