Fix: S Voice call contact issues on Samsung Galaxy S7

Samsung is a leading developer and manufacturer of smartphones for a good reason. They are known for innovations and one of those was S Voice, a personal voice assistant that cleared the path for long-awaited Bixby. S Voice is one of the firstly introduced exclusive smart assistants, and it’s still an amazing trait that makes already great phones even better.

However, just as same as others, S Voice suffers from occasional issues and bugs that sometimes render it completely unusable. The list of issues is long but we made sure to mention some:

• S Voice can’t respond to a command. It keeps listening but to no avail.
• S Voice can’t reach contacts you requested it to call.
• Application crashes or freezes.
• S Voice won’t function with 3rd-party apps.

For that purpose, we conducted a thorough research in order to bring you a few possible workarounds for your problem with Samsung’s smart assistant. If you’ve experienced these or similar issues, make sure to check the list below. Hopefully, at least one should help you resolve the problem at hand.

Reset your S7 and disable/re-enable S Voice

The first step you should take is a simple restart. It might seem too obvious, but it helped more times than not. In addition, make sure to disable and enable again the S Voice feature. It’s not unusual for Samsung’s built-in apps to malfunction, so this cycle should resolve possible infringement with some other third-party app or OK Google itself.

1. Double tap the Home button to access S Voice.
2. Open 3-dot menu.
3. Tap Settings.
4. Under Wake-up, uncheck the box beside ”Open via the Home Key”.
5. Restart your S7.
6. Follow the same path and check the box beside ”Open via the Home Key”.

Or, you can navigate to Application manager and force stop it from there:

1. Tap Settings.
2. Open Application manager.
3. Navigate to S Voice app.
4. Tap Force Stop.
5. Restart your S7 and give it another try.

If the problem is still there, make sure to continue with troubleshooting steps below.

Update the app

For many users, including me, Nougat update, besides multiple improvements, brought the plethora of issues. And S Voice was affected, too. Luckily, some of the latest updates addressed reported errors, so it should be better optimized for the latest OS edition. So, navigate to Play Store and update your S Voice app.

This a well-known procedure but it won’t hurt to repeat it below:

1. Connect to Wi-Fi.
2. Tap the Play Store app.
3. Open the 3-stripe menu.
4. Open My apps & games.
5. Tap Check for updates.
6. If available, update the S Voice app.

Enable S Voice ”Voice wake-up”

If you’re using S Voice without contact with your device, you need to make sure to enable the Voice Wakeup feature. This enables you to give commands to your S7 without unlocking it once it auto-locks itself. Follow these steps to enable the ”Voice Wake-up” feature and look for changes in assistants behavior:

1. Open the S Voice app.
2. Tap the 3-stripes menu and open Settings.
3. Toggle ON ”Voice Wake-up”.
4. Exit and try to issue a command to your handset.

Copy contacts to S7 phonebook

Many users use cloud services to backup their contact and as the main phone book. However, some users reported that S Voice can’t access contacts if they’re not present on default Samsung phone book. It seems awkward, but it actually makes sense. So, because of that, it’s recommended to copy your contacts to the built-in Samsung app and try again.

In order to perform that action, follow the instructions below:

1. Open Contacts.
2. Tap the 3-dot menu and open Organize contacts.
3. Tap Copy contacts.
4. Select Google or any other cloud backup you originally use.
5. Mark all contacts and transfer them to Phone memory.
6. Restart your S7.
7. Try using S Voice for hands-free calls again. It should recognize contacts.

Re-sync S Voice app

Besides the ”soft reset” we mentioned below, you can completely clear S Voice data and let it re-sync again. That’s kind of analogous to hard reset. Additionally, you can clear the complete app data within the App manager. Either way, this should allow you to start from a scratch and, hopefully, resolve the issues at hand. Have in mind that you’ll need to set preferences again after that.

To clear preferences and re-sync S Voice, follow the instructions below:

1. Double tap the Home button to access S Voice.
2. Open 3-dot menu.
3. Tap Settings.
4. Swipe to the bottom and tap ”Erase Data”.
5. Restart your device and give it another try.

In addition, you can erase app’s cache and data:

1. Tap Settings.
2. Open Application manager.
3. Navigate to S Voice app.
4. Tap to open it and select Storage.
5. Tap on Clear Cache and Clear Data.
6. Restart your handset.

Change language to English

Some users reported improvement of S Voice performance once they changed the language to English (US). We can’t be sure why exactly that’s the case, but it’s worth a shot. It might be problematic if you’re not an English speaker for advanced commands, but it should function well with the simple ones.

If you’re not sure how to do it, follow the instructions below:

1. Open S Voice App.
2. Tap the 3-dot menu and open Settings.
3. Choose Language.
4. Select English (US) from the list.
5. Confirm changes and restart your phone.

That proved helpful for some users, so it might be just enough for you.

Disable OK Google

Besides S Voice smart voice assistant, Samsung users can use default Android app called OK Google. Now, in theory, both applications should work together in a seamless manner. But, due to similarity, sometimes one can negatively affect the other and, consequently, cause failures. Basically, if the problem is repetitive, you should choose one or another. Some users use Samsung Car and that feature only functions with native S Voice.

If you’re keen to use S Voice rather than OK Google, at least in certain situations, you can disable OK Google. For that purpose, follow the steps below and disable OK Google.

1. Open the Google app.
2. Tap the 3-stripe menu and open Settings.
3. Open Voice.
4. Disable OK Google detection and confirm changes.

Use OK Google instead of S Voice

At the end, even though it comes with some exclusive, specific features, S Voice isn’t exactly on par with OK Google. With the latest updates to Google’s smart assistance, most of the Android users are enjoying in feature-rich native voice assistant. This isn’t a solution per se, but if you’re unable to make the S Voice work, it’s an obvious choice.

It’s hard to give up on all the options a smart assistant offers, so if you are unable to use Samsung’s S Voice, OK Google should be enough. For that purpose, you can completely disable the S Voice feature.

1. Tap Settings.
2. Open Application manager.
3. Navigate to S Voice app.
4. Tap Disable.
5. Restart your device.

Perform a factory reset

Finally, if nothing works, and you can say with certainty that the system update is the main culprit, you should restore your device to factory settings and give another try. All of us know how much trouble Nougat brought for some users, so maybe this is the final solution we’re looking forward to.

1. Backup your data.
2. Open Settings.
3. Tap Backup & Restore.
4. Open Factory Data Reset.
5. Choose to Reset Device.
6. Tap Erase Everything.
7. Confirm selection and insert your passcode or PIN.

That should do it. If you have any questions or suggestions, we look forward to hearing from you. Have a good day and thank you for reading. We hope it helped you.