CES: VW Press Event Emphasizes a Future Transformed by AI
By Phil Lelyveld
January 9, 2024
Volkswagen’s CES press conference on Monday gave us a window into what we expect to see during this week’s CES 2024. The presentation centered entirely around artificial intelligence. VW has partnered with Cerence to speed the integration of AI tech into their vehicles’ in-cabin experience. The implementation touches on combining AI with spatial web capabilities. And VW has worked to make the in-car experience seamlessly compatible with AI-enhanced in-home and mobile device experiences that consumers are embracing. Not once during the presentation did they mention anything about car design or performance other than how it relates to AI implementation.
VW will be adding ChatGPT to the voice control system in all of its new models, including internal combustion engine models. Their pitch is two-fold: first, democratizing technology is in VW’s DNA — and second, AI is relevant to their customers, who expect intuitive experiences and human-like interactions in their cars similar to the ones in their homes and on their phones.
Because human language is very complex, VW has partnered with Cerence, which specializes in automotive AI integration. Chat Pro, Cerence’s implementation of AI with the existing VW IDA voice assistant, seamlessly responds to questions, routes car-specific voice commands, and allows VW to feed the system with customized information. It is integrated into the infotainment, navigation and climate control systems.
The live demo covered a number of areas. When the person sitting in the front passenger seat said “Hello IDA. Turn on the temperature to 74 degrees,” IDA responded with “All right. I’m setting the temperature in the right front area to 74.0 degrees.” Cerence audio AI detected the location of the speaker and provide an appropriate location-specific response. Think of this as the pairing of AI with spatial audio, which will evolve over time to spatial web implementations.
In another situation, you can tell IDA that you need medicine, or you want to buy a phone charger, and it will respond with a list of and map to nearby stores that sell the item.
Finally, they demonstrated in-car natural language search and voice response of any general knowledge query by asking it to explain a student’s homework assignment. Cerence CTO Iqbal Arshad said the system is “safe, secure, and instant.” Only general knowledge questions will be routed up to the LLM, he noted. Everything else will be processed in-car for low latency.
The AI assistant will be offered in Europe in the Golf, Passat, Tiguan, ID.3, ID.4, ID.5, and ID.7 starting second quarter 2024. They have not yet decided when to make it available in the US market.
The longterm goal, Cerence CEO Stefan Ortmanns explained, is to work with VW to evolve the system from an in-car assistant to a human-like companion.
They closed the event by asking IDA to provide closing remarks, which was effectively a general demo of ChatGPT and text-to-voice rather than anything related to VW, thereby reinforcing the idea that this year AI will be the star of CES.
The Volkswagen Newsroom offers details on its integration of ChatGPT. The 20-minute CES presentation is available on YouTube.
See the original post here: https://www.etcentric.org/ces-vw-press-event-emphasizes-a-future-transformed-by-ai/