The technology in new cars that bedevils drivers more than any other is voice recognition.

In a presentation on Wednesday at the annual Management Briefing Seminars of the Center for Automotive Research, held in Traverse City, Mich., Kristin Kolodge of J.▥D. Power said that 32 percent of all infotainment-related complaints were a result of voice-recognition errors, according to the company’s quality studies.

“People think it’s their fault,” Ms. Kolodge, Power’s executive director for driver interaction and human machine interface, said in a telephone interview. “They start to raise their voices, and it still doesn’t work.”

It’s not the person’s fault, Ms. Kolodge said — it’s the voice systems that need improvement. For instance, some vehicles can understand only a handful of commands and work only if the driver is on the corresponding screen; speaking an address won’t work when the system is looking for radio stations.

Such systems are handicapped by limited memory and processing power, said Mike Thompson, an executive vice president at Nuance Communications, whose voice recognition technology is used in cars and cellphones.