Android Auto Google Assistant glitch leaves new Android 13 users driving solo

What’s the most failure-prone device in your life? For many of us, vehicles probably top that list, and from clutches dying, to oxygen sensors going bad, it seems like there’s no shortage of things that can break in our cars. Sometimes it feels like that curse has carried over to Android Auto, and every few months we’re following the latest story about phones failing to play nicely with seemingly Android-compatible cars. Now the latest is causing headaches for some users when trying to access the Google Assistant.

As a small but seemingly growing number of Android users are discovering, when this glitch manifests, Assistant on Auto is no longer able to respond to the “Hey Google” wakeword. Operation still works when voice input is triggered via the on-screen interface or by pressing a hardware button, but voice-only attempts fail to respond, or are met by a black screen. One commonality behind these reports, and one that aligns with the small but growing report rate, is that it mainly seems to affect phones that have been upgraded to now run Android 13.

Google appears aware of the problem, but while the issue has been around for weeks now, there’s still no official fix available. One suggestion we’ve seen positive feedback in regard to advises attempting to uninstall the Google app in order to roll back updates, and then disable auto-updating. While that’s less than an ideal solution, it may be your best option for the time being.

In looking for more reports of this behavior, 9to5Google also discovered another newly identified Auto issue wherein text-to-speech output when receiving messages seems to no longer be available. Whether these two voice-related problems are connected or not, we don’t yet know, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for more information about both.