Bosch has developed a new technology that will allow drivers to input voice command to activate functions in the cars. Taking a leaf of tech giants like Amazon and Apple with Alexa and Siri, Bosch wants to bring this very natural technology into every day cars.
Having studied existing voice command functions that offer little help, they are frequently structured as a menu of possible options and the driver must commit the structure to memory and read the required commands from the display. The Bosch assistant no longer responds to rigidly worded commands. The voice recognition system understands natural sentence structures and can even handle accents and dialects, and it does so in more than 30 countries of the world. Casey the in car assistant developed by the German auto company, can speak English in British, American, New Zealand, or Australian dialect. More than a decade of work has been invested in the development of the voice control. Thinking ahead and learning drivers habits, the system can can think ahead and learns for instance,if the driver wants to call “Paul”, the system automatically reviews the contacts and considers the driver’s present location, time, and situation before responding. When on the way to the office in the morning, “Paul” probably means the colleague at work while the same name in the evening might refer to the best friend. To make sure, the system asks question: “I have found five contacts called Paul. Do you want to call Paul Stevenson?” This dependency on context is a first stage of artificial intelligence.
The infotainment system in the car takes over the calculation without sending any data to the cloud. Casey even stays with the drivers in tunnels, when far away from areas with good mobile network coverage, or in other countries when the smartphone is offline.
While not everyone is comfortable with just one name like Alexa or Siri, Bosch voice recognition system understands and speaks 30 different languages with a total of 44 female and 9 male voices and the driver can change the name to make the assistant more personal.
