TomTom and Microsoft launch a generative AI car assistant
On Tuesday, digital mapping tech company TomTom and Microsoft announced a generative AI voice control assistant for cars.
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The backstory: Voice controls in cars are not a new concept. They’ve been around for years but tend to be somewhat buggy or inconvenient for users. For example, CarPlay is a common voice control tool, and Android Auto is another. While they work for some people, other times they end up not working right, leading drivers to take their eyes off the road to figure out what’s going on. That totally defeats the purpose of car voice controls altogether.
More recently: It’s gotten to the point where some car makers, like GM, have said they’re going to stop using voice control tools in their vehicles. But now that we have generative artificial intelligence (AI), we can design voice controls to be more adaptive to human interaction. Earlier this year, Mercedes announced that it would be using ChatGPT to improve its MBUX voice control system in a beta program. It also used Microsoft’s OpenAI platform, Azure.
The development: On Tuesday, digital mapping tech company TomTom and Microsoft announced a generative AI voice control assistant for cars. It’ll be built on a foundation of Microsoft’s Azure, and TomTom’s Digital Cockpit. It’s supposed to be more conversational and intuitive to use, allowing drivers to focus more on the road. The AI controls will apparently enable drivers to "converse naturally with their vehicles" and use their voices to control infotainment, mapping and their car’s command systems. This would mean that drivers would be able to even do things like regulate temperature and open and close the car windows by just talking to their cars. This new system will be demonstrated for the first time at the CES tech show in January. It’s not clear when this system will be publicly available.
Key comments:
"Drivers can converse naturally with their vehicle and ask the AI-powered assistant to navigate to a certain location, find specific stops along their route, and vocally control onboard systems to, for instance, turn up the temperature, open windows, or change radio stations," TomTom's press release says. "All with a single interaction."
“CarPlay and Android Auto have stability issues that manifest themselves as bad connections, poor rendering, slow responses, and dropped connections,” GM's head of product for infotainment, Tim Babbitt, told “MotorTrend.”
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