Garmin’s new voice controls are slashing battery life in half

Garmin recently debuted a major update for a selection of its watches, including the crucial safety feature of all-day fall detection.

But the headline addition, the ability to carry out hands-free voice commands, has been causing big battery life problems.

Just like the hands-free Siri and Google Gemini access on the latest Apple and Wear OS watches, it’s now possible to carry out voice-activated functions from your Garmin watch, such as starting a timer or a workout, all by starting with the phrase ‘OK Garmin’.

It’s a great feature in itself, and one that certainly helps to bring Garmin’s wearables more in line with modern smartwatches, but users are now reporting that having hands-free activation enabled reduces the battery life of their watch by roughly 35% to 50%.

As Gadgets & Wearables first spotted, many Garmin owners have taken to the company’s forums to complain about the issue, with the high-end Fenix 8 one of the worst-affected devices. One user explained that they could only get seven days of use from their Fenix 8 following the update, which is half of what they would get beforehand.

Garmin

An insufficient solution

Thankfully, it’s far from an unfixable issue – simply switching off the optional feature should restore battery life to its usual levels.

But this is hardly ideal, given that it was supposed to be one of Garmin’s biggest software plays of the year.

With the Samsung Galaxy Watch 9 and the Apple Watch Series 12, the trend has been to expand the fitness tracking capabilities of those watches with more health-led metrics, with the former now giving users insights into their heart health and daily cardio load.

Because Garmin has long led the charge on fitness tracking, its recent ambitions have gone in the other direction as the brand tries to incorporate more smart features, as we’ve seen Garmin Pay expand to include more banks in recent years, while a native Google Maps app finally made its way to compatible devices last year.

Garmin itself admits that hands-free activation does have an impact on battery life, but our hope is that the brand finds a way to fix this and make it a more viable option going forward.

It’s not all bad news for Garmin, though. The company unveiled the excellent Garmin Cirqa earlier this year – a screenless fitness tracker designed to compete with the Fitbit Air and the Whoop Strap. It’s proven to be quite a popular device, as Garmin has struggled to keep up with demand.