Truck is a 2012 KR I ordered from the factory in 2012, with the Sony system, and basic Sync.

When i got the truck, I downloaded music from my iMac onto a memory stick, which fits in the USB port, and it's worked fine, until a couple days ago.
in case you don't use this feature, with the radio on, in the AUX mode, you can left click the media button on the right side of the steering wheel, and the voice says "usb, please say a command"

You can say "Play artist, Benny Goodman" and all his music you have will play in sequence.
Or for a single song, you say "Play track, Luckenbach Texas" and Waylon sings his song.

It worked fine the last 5 years, until I started the truck the other day, asked to play a track, and the response was "This device did not recognize speech commands." Oh great!

I called the 800 number for Sync, she talked me through a reboot, and nothing changed. She then suggested I go online, download the software upgrades, as I've never done any upgrades.

The on line site was very good. I downloaded everything to a clean, properly formatted memory stick, stuck it in the radio, went through the rather simple install process, but it wouldnt accept it. Any bright ideas out there, besides letting the dealer do it?

I also question why my system would be working fine one day, and not the next because I never installed any upgrades. So maybe the problem is something else.

Thanks for any ideas.

 

I'll answer my own question. I called my dealer. He said do a hard reset by disconnecting the battery for 10 mins.

The speech command is working again. Hope this helps someone else.

 

FYI, you can accomplish the same thing by pulling fuse #2 in the fusebox behind the passenger-side kick panel, waiting a second, and putting it back. Pulling that fuse kills power to the APIM (the Sync module), effectively forcing it to reboot.

A Reboot function was added to Sync 4.6, but 4.6 introduced other exciting new bugs...

 

Since the reset got my Sync system working the way it's worked the last 5 years, and I was happy with that, is there any reason I should pursue
trying to update the system?

 

You might want to try the update, I did my 13 FX4 last year and was amazed at how much better the whole system worked. It was a major pain in the butt to get the files to work but I kept trying till It went through.

 

If you're happy with it, leave it alone.

Sync updates have a nasty habit of replacing old familiar bugs with exciting new bugs. As far as I could tell, 4.6 only adds the Reboot function to 4.4's base functionality, but some Windows Phone and iPhone users (myself included) had trouble with 4.6 screwing up the voice interface to Cortana and Siri (respectively).

As I recall, the only thing 4.4 really changed over 4.2 was that it defaults to the last source being used when the system powered down, but Ford pulled 4.4 not long after its release, so 4.4 is hard to find.

 

Sync doesn't have a problem. Sync is the problem. Unfortunately, with the intro of Sync 3, us poor bastages with Sync 2 and 1 will see little to no improvements.

 

Had the same problem in a 2015 Transit Van, and in the 2013 F150 I just bought. I did an update to sync as well, seemed to have fixed the issue in the F150, the Transit still has this issue bi-weekly or if I'm lucky, bi-monthly.