i3 - January/February 2019 - 24

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019

"Home-to-car and
technology
car-to-home technol
ogy
adoption will be more accelerated than
it has in the past, and voice is just key -
very intuitive."
- B R I A N I N O U Y E , TOYO TA
service to enable the assistant to learn and adapt to the user's preferences over
time. Nevertheless, IPA complements rather than replaces other voice assistants
in BMW vehicles, including Alexa, the automaker asserts. Its primary purpose is
to explain vehicle functions to users and control vehicle settings and systems.
Indeed, the future of voice assistants in the car lies with AI and machine
learning so the vehicle can anticipate users' needs and be proactive, says
Toyota's Inouye. Toyota wants the assistant to have deeper access to a vehicle's
internal systems and functions than it can
today. Amazon Alexa is not the finish line,
he emphasizes.
"In the end, ideally, you'll want to speak
with one [assistant]," but until that time cars
will be equipped with a variety of virtual assistants operating simultaneously, Inouye says.
Another idea is for the voice assistant to
have a guise. "One early insight we had about
voice systems was that people were very disorientated if there was no physical manifestation of it," says ustwo's Smith. "So, we've
developed a concept where the voice system
meets you where you're looking through a
physical manifestation - a graphical representation of the voice assistant that follows
your gaze. For the driver that might be somewhere near the road, in the [instrument] cluster or the heads-up display area.
"The other thing is, when you address it, it
can move to you," as a way of showing its
attentive, he says. "If the passenger starts
speaking, it can move away from the driver
and be somewhere more appropriate for the
passenger." It may also change form in this
I T I S I N N O VAT I O N

Prev. Page- Car: Oliver Burston/Getty Images, House: Royce Bair/Getty Images. This page, left to right: iPad, Court. of Mercedes. Court. of BMW, Simon2579/Getty Images.

up to where we want it to be." Last January,
the automaker launched its FordPass
Alexa skill, which enables Ford owners to
tell Alexa to remotely start their vehicles or
fetch odometer, tire pressure and fuel level
readings from it. A partnership with
Google will bring Google Assistant to Ford
vehicles soon, Halash says.
According to Amazon, Ford is among
more than 15 automaker brands using Alexa
for remote vehicle management, including
BMW, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and Toyota.
Some automakers - including Ford and
Toyota - are integrating Alexa directly into
their vehicles' infotainment systems.
Toyota has integrated Alexa in its 2019
Avalon sedan and Corolla hatchback plus
the Lexus ES sedan. It was accomplished in
tight collaboration with Amazon engineers
and is based on Ford's Smart Device Link
platform technology, which allows seamless
integration of Alexa in infotainment systems, explains Brian Inouye, chief product
owner of apps and services at the digital
transformation and mobility division of
Toyota Motor North America in Plano, TX.
So, "guests" (Toyota's term for vehicle
owners) can now use the car's infotainment system to access smart home controls that were only available through a
brought-in smartphone app, Inouye says.
And with more than 50,000 Alexa skills
available, what's controllable now includes
garage door openers as well as smart lighting systems and refrigerators. He says,
"Some of this stuff may seem like a niche
but is popular with consumers."
"As vehicles became connected, it opens
these use cases that were not possible
before," he says. "So, home-to-car and carto-home technology adoption will be more
accelerated than it has in the past, and
voice is just key - very intuitive."
Meanwhile, BMW and Mercedes-Benz
have developed their own proprietary invehicle voice assistants. Mercedes' MBUX
infotainment system that debuted at CES
2018 is triggered by "Hey Mercedes"; and
BMW's Intelligent Personal Assistant
(IPA), which was announced in
September for 2019 models, responds to
any name the user assigns it.
BMW's IPA also includes a portable
digital customer profile, dubbed BMW ID,
uses artificial intelligence (AI) and links to
the automaker's own Open Mobility Cloud

i3 - January/February 2019

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