Android Aut-Oh No! Mysterious bug adds 'oh' when reading text messages in your car

We all know better than to be using our phones when driving, which is exactly why we have speech-to-text and text-to-speech for handling our messaging. And when that’s all easily accessible through the dash and your vehicle’s integrated controls with the help of Android Auto, so much the better! But right now, we’re learning about one really weird bug that’s getting in the way of Android Auto reading you your text messages.

A very confused group of Android Auto users have been sharing their stories over on Reddit in a thread started by user Grant_Son, and while this sounds like it involves a lot of different messaging apps, the common denominator is that people are hearing the word “oh” inserted at the end of messages (via 9to5Google). Reports identify this strange behavior with WhatsApp, Teams, Facebook, and ever regular old Google Messages.

The number of users chiming in with their own confirmation sure makes this bug feel reasonably widespread, even if we don’t yet know the exact situations under which it’s triggered. Could this be a failed, misguided attempt at making Google’s synthesized voices sound more human by adding hesitation sounds? And while there are enough voices in these reports to make us think there’s something to this, we haven’t yet unearthed any similar stories over on Google’s own Android Auto support forums. We’re also very curious to hear this in action for ourselves, but so far no one appears to have shared a recording.

Right now this has the vibe of “annoying but relatively harmless,” although we could see someone getting into trouble with something like receiving a two-factor code via text, and Android Auto adds a superfluous “oh” onto the end. If all this sounds like too big a problem for you, maybe just wait to go through your messages until after reaching your destination.