Hello Folks,

 

Wonder if any of you can help with a bit of an annoying issue with the infotainment on my MkIII Octavia.

 

I personally cant get away with touch screens while driving due to the lack of physical feedback, i find them distracting and much prefer buttons or voice control. I've been using the voice control to make calls however I've noticed that with a lot of contacts it will say "The contact has multiple telephone numbers", forcing me to then have to use the screen.

 

Looking at it, it seems that all of these contacts are people who also feature in my Whatsapp contacts list. Removing Whatsapp from my phone solves the issue, however this isnt really an option as I used it a lot for work stuff. Phone is Android (Huawei) if that helps any.

 

Bit of a nuisance given my 14 year old MkII with a £90 parrot kit could make calls quite happily with no such issues.

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

so are these actually duplicates of the same number for each contact or does every contact have say a landline number and mobile number. Have you set contacts in the phone with "default" numbers? I.e if you clicked on a contact on the phone the first number is always the one you set as default. This may bring the number you need to the top of the list shown each time. 

 

In my 2016 SEL with MIB 2 headunit, the voice control allows me to say 1or 2 to choose the number I want when a contact has multiple numbers. Is your Columbus so maybe it handles it differently?  

My infotainment system does exactly that, asks me for a line number, however the voice control is so 5h17, that I tend to use the voice control on my mobile which does it almost perfectly. 

 

So, interesting update - having done a lot of googling I found a few things squirrelled away on the XDA forums that suggest that WhatsApp has difficulties with contact telephone numbers where there are spaces on the number e.g. '01234 123 345'

 

I've been through and edited all of my contacts to remove the spaces - e.g. '01234123345'

 

The Huawei contacts app wouldnt allow for this, I had to use the Google contacts app to update the details on my Google account.

 

Having reconnected to the car a couple of times there no longer seem to be any duplicate contacts, although I am wary that at some stage WhatsApp will re-sync and it will happen again.

18 hours ago, paulski said:

so are these actually duplicates of the same number for each contact or does every contact have say a landline number and mobile number. Have you set contacts in the phone with "default" numbers? I.e if you clicked on a contact on the phone the first number is always the one you set as default. This may bring the number you need to the top of the list shown each time. 

 

In my 2016 SEL with MIB 2 headunit, the voice control allows me to say 1or 2 to choose the number I want when a contact has multiple numbers. Is your Columbus so maybe it handles it differently?  

 

Not with the car at the moment, but essentially my phone contacts are all on my Google account.

 

Each contact on the phone has one entry, e.g. 'Dave' - on the phone Dave will have one telephone number listed and also a WhatsApp call icon.

 

In the car , when I ask it to 'Dial Dave' it will bring up that contact with a message 'contact has multiple numbers' (or words to that effect) with two identical phone numbers listed within the contact.

 

I haven't set up any default numbers etc. As I've never had this issue on any other cars.

 

It's definitely related to WhatsApp as uninstalling that application or denying it access to contacts on the phone makes the problem go away (unfortunately not practical for my purposes)

 

Hopefully I've hit upon a fix above but I'm not holding my breath. 

On 07/09/2020 at 15:57, BigJakk said:

So, interesting update - having done a lot of googling I found a few things squirrelled away on the XDA forums that suggest that WhatsApp has difficulties with contact telephone numbers where there are spaces on the number e.g. '01234 123 345'

 

I've been through and edited all of my contacts to remove the spaces - e.g. '01234123345'

 

So after a few days and having re-synced my contacts several times both between Google and WhatsApp as well as between the phone and the car, bizarrely enough this seems to have fixed the problem.

 

(There is still one contact showing as having two duplicate numbers -- can't figure out why, but the rest are all fixed).

 

Just thought I would report back for anyone else who may be having the same issue.