Rivian Assistant Text Messaging and My Wife
First off, let me state that I’m thrilled that we have finally have this capability at all after years of nothing but unsafe smartphone usage. I don’t want to spark the whole smartphone projection debate here, but I am on the side of choice is better than relying on one company to create all of the software itself. Imagine if you could only use Apple’s apps on your iPhone or Mac, or Google’s on Android, or Microsoft’s on Windows.
But heres the thing about Rivian’s text messaging implementation that I do get daily shit for - my wife hates it.
Every sentence it sends ends in a period. It’s tone is always matter of fact, never friendly. You can’t even dictate punctuation, it just spells them out i.e “See you soon. Exclamation point.” - I’m not kidding.
It texts like my 65 year old father in law.
I asked RA if there were any settings that would allow me to alter the tone to more casual, friendly, etc. hoping that like every other modern assistant it would offer some ability to change how it approaches its messaging. Sadly not.
Beyond that, the UI cuts off message previews even when there are inches of free white space underneath, opting to aggressively concatenate into a … after three lines instead of previewing the entire message.
Again - it’s great they’ve added something, but this is yet another solved issue that they have taken onto themselves and have yet again delivered an implementation that is not up to the standards of the smartphone project versions we’ve had for over a decade.
I may never get CarPlay - but perhaps we can get this to the point where every message doesn’t come off as passive aggressive 😂