The car

A dashboard has one rule and we did not write it: what you do while driving, you do with your voice. Everything that follows is built around that.

In CarPlay, four tabs

CarPlay has its own screen, with four lists and nothing more, all of them communication:

• Call: who you need to call, with the reason under the name.
• Today: the day appointments as people sorted by time, to call them or give them a heads-up.
• Messages: your client threads, unread ones first.
• Team: your team chat threads, kept separate on purpose, with the Galilei thread pinned on top.

Team sits apart from Messages for a practical reason: mixing a client asking about a house with your broker asking for a contract is exactly the mistake that gets you answering the wrong one.

Hot at the top, and a single signal

The queue splits in two: hot leads first, the rest after. And the only visual mark on the whole screen is the flame on a hot lead, precisely so it competes with nothing.

When what you are seeing came from the last download rather than right now, the time sits in the list header. In a car you cannot go investigate whether data is fresh, so it says so itself.

Tapping a thread does two different things

And it is worth knowing which, because there is no undoing it with your hands on the wheel. Tapping an unread thread has Siri read it out loud. Tapping an already-read thread opens dictation to reply to that person.

Galilei greets you in the morning

With the car already connected and inside the morning window (in your profile time, not the phone clock) Galilei asks whether you want the day plan. The car reads the question out loud and you answer by talking.

• "Yes" brings the plan, dictated in short sentences: how many calls there are, who comes first and why, the next appointment.
• "In half an hour" or "at ten" schedules it for then, and it arrives even if you are no longer connected to the car.
• "Stop writing to me" turns the greeting off and leaves you the link to change your mind from Settings.

It is not a notification in disguise: the greeting and your answer are messages in its thread, so you can open them later on the phone with the whole history. And it is one a day at most: an assistant that nags at the wheel gets in the way.

The control post, with no screen

In the car there is no task list to look at, so you ask out loud: "Hey Siri, my day plan in Galilei Hub." Siri is the doorbell; the one who answers is Galilei, with today's data. And it does more than answer: ask it to mark a task done, to postpone it, or to say you are running late, and it does it.

Android Auto has no screen of its own, and that is fine

Android Auto does not let a work app draw its own screen: its templates are for navigation, parking, charging and points of interest. What the car does project is messaging notifications.

So that is where team and client messages go: the car reads them out loud with the sender's name and you reply by dictating. Less screen, exactly the same function.