This model attaches to one of your car’s air vents.īefore the ZeroTouch, I had to pull out my phone and launch the Vivint app if I needed to do any of those things from the car. Logitech’s ZeroTouch automobile smartphone mount has a battery-powered Bluetooth radio onboard. Instead I tell Alexa to turn lights on and off, adjust the temperature, lock an exterior door, or arm the alarm system. I almost never reach out for a light switch, adjust the temperature at the thermostat, or even touch the Vivint Sky control panel (other than to disarm the system in the morning). In my home, I have several Amazon Echo devices connected to a Vivint smart home system that monitors my home’s security and controls nearly all its interior and exterior lighting, entry locks, thermostat, garage-door opener, and security cameras. ![]() (It’s obviously not permanently mounted in this photo.) Make sure it doesn’t obstruct your view through the windshield, or you could be ticketed in some jurisdictions. This model of the Logitech ZeroTouch is designed to be glued to your dashboard. I’ll dive deeper into this and the ZeroTouch’s other features later for now, I want to focus on Logitech’s Alexa integration. The only way I could stream media and hear the ZeroTouch’s voice prompts on my phone in the car was to physically connect the phone’s headphone jack to the car’s aux input. That wasn’t an issue with the new Kenwood KMM-BT515HD head unit I recently installed in my truck, but the Bluetooth in my 2010 VW Golf only allowed me to make and receive phone calls. To do that, however, your car’s Bluetooth system must be capable of supporting both phone calls and media streaming. The ZeroTouch supports Spotify, Deezer, Pandora, or Google Play Music. If you want to listen to music on your car stereo, it’s far better to pair the ZeroTouch with your head unit and stream music from your phone over Bluetooth. I found myself constantly reaching for the head unit’s volume control either because the ZeroTouch was alerting me to an incoming message or because I wanted to use the ZeroTouch. Those are played on the phone’s speaker while the head unit is playing the radio. ![]() I don’t recommend it because it’s too distracting: The head unit’s radio will cut out when your phone rings, so you can answer the call, but it won’t do that for the ZeroTouch’s voice prompts. I’m accustomed to listening to NPR news broadcasts when I’m in the car, however, so I tried using the ZeroTouch independently of the head unit for a while. ![]() Icons and text are prominently displayed, but you almost never need to look at the phone because a voice reads everything to you.įortunately, this doesn’t impact using Bluetooth to make and receive calls via your head unit. That’s an Android requirement, but it makes it nearly impossible to listen to terrestrial radio on the head unit and interact with the ZeroTouch-or Alexa-at the same time. It’s not a bug, as the saying goes, it’s a feature: If you want the ZeroTouch’s (and Alexa’s) voice responses played through your car’s speakers, you’ll need to set your head unit to operate in media mode. The hiccups I encountered turned out to be not the fault of the product, but there is one other limitation (beyond being Android-only) that you’ll want to know about right up front.
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