Orrich Lawson
Over the past decade or so, cars have become very complex machines, often with complex user interfaces. For the most part, the industry has added touches to the almost ubiquitous infotainment screens. Despite much evidence that touchscreen interfaces increase driver distraction, they are simpler and cheaper to manufacture and offer more flexibility in UI design.
But, as I recently discovered with some newer cars, there may be a better way to tell our car what to do. Frankly, voice control in cars has gotten really good over the years. At least with some manufacturers anyway. Please try to imagine. Imagine a car that understands your accent, interrupts prompts, and actually does what you ask instead of spitting out, “Sorry Dave, we can’t do that.”
If you’ve ever used a recent BMW with iDrive 8 or a Mercedes-Benz with MBUX, you really don’t have to imagine. These cars (some of which are pretty decent EVs) don’t require you to interact with the touchscreen while driving for most functions.
For example, if you tell the car it’s cold, the temperature inside the car will rise. Or, more specifically, telling the car to “set the front temperature to 75 degrees” or “set the seat heaters to level 2” would be better, at least for me, than what the touchscreen does. Much easier than remembering what you’re using segments for. I’m going to hit
Speech recognition is also good enough to understand when you tell it to navigate to a specific address. The latest is that if he’s driving a BMW or Mercedes, he actually uses the native navigation system instead of relying on her CarPlay like others do. I can’t say enough about BMW’s Gesture Control when the passenger in the passenger seat speaks with their hands.
Part of the credit should probably go to Cerence, which provides voice assistants to both BMW and Mercedes (among other things), as do BYD, Renault, VinFast, and others (Cerence told Ars). Much of the software runs on the car, giving it access to features not found in cars using Google’s Android Automotive OS. Additionally, Google’s once-rumored voice assistant seems to have gotten worse at understanding speech over the past 12 months or so, but we still don’t know why.
BMW
My enthusiasm for talking to cars seems to put me in the minority. For a generation of geeks who grew up on the adventures of KITT and Michael Knight, nobody else seems to want to talk to their cars. As mentioned earlier, good voice control systems are not yet widespread.
But even among colleagues testing the same car at other outlets, praising the excellent voice interface is almost always greeted with skepticism.
A £5,000 car isn’t the same as a smartphone
“I think part of it is that there is something inherently social about language. For thousands of years, language has evolved as an inherently social system. “I think there’s something that makes us hesitate to talk to something else unsentient. It exists,” said Betty Birner, a professor of linguistics and cognitive sciences at Northern Illinois University.
“We talk to dogs, but you may not want to talk to toasters. My mind communicates with yours,” she told me.
“The other thing I want to say is, obviously, cars can kill people. Toasters can kill people, but we really need to work on it. There’s a real danger in trusting artificial intelligence really really, I don’t think people understand how far artificial intelligence and natural language processing have come, they’re going to trust it with their lives No.” said Verner.
