Nuance Communications Inc. announced this week that its Dragon Drive artificial intelligence (AI) platform for the connected car now features expanded conversational and cognitive capabilities for its Automotive Assistant to provide everyone in the car – drivers and passengers – with the ability to ask for navigation, music, content and other in-car features just by speaking – no wake-up phrase or button press required.
Dragon Drive is also expanding car-to-home and home-to-car interoperability for automakers with the ability to create their own customized in-car infotainment features that can talk to and control smart home systems and applications. Dragon Drive powers more than 160 million cars on the road across 40 languages, creating conversational experiences for Audi, BMW, Ford, GM and many others.
Dragon Drive can interact with passengers in each seat through a combination of its automotive-grade signal enhancement and acoustics innovation with voice-biometrics, ambient wake-up, hybrid embedded-cloud speech recognition and natural language understanding, and text-to-speech. Dragon Drive’s entire stack is powered by Nuance’s machine learning and contextual reasoning to create an AI platform optimized for the connected car – and an assistant that is able to listen, understand, anticipate, respond and proactively engage with both drivers and passengers. So even a passenger in the back seat can say “play my favorites” and Dragon Drive’s Automotive Assistant delivers a personalized streaming radio station or play list.
Dragon Drive is also advancing the vision for car-to-home and home-to-car interoperability with a flexible platform that allows the automotive assistant to easily integrate with third-party apps and services such as lighting, security and other smart home hub services, giving drivers and passengers the ability to stay connected to the car and the home no matter where they are.
A recently published survey conducted by Nuance among the world’s leading automakers has shown that more than 90 percent of participants confirmed that AI is important or very important to their company’s human machine interface (HMI) strategy, with 85 percent of respondents adding that personalization of that experience is important or very important. Additionally, 43 percent of respondents noted that AI will have the greatest impact on increasing overall user satisfaction with in-car systems.
Empowering automakers to make the AI-driven connected car a reality, Nuance has expanded the conversational and cognitive AI capabilities of Dragon Drive with even more features and functionality for everyone in the car. Drivers and passengers will have a personalized experience all the way from music preferences, to navigation, points of interest, news feeds and in-car features such as heating and air conditioning, leading to Automotive Assistant understanding and learning needs and preferences over time.
“Giving automakers the ability to integrate a central, customized automotive assistant is essential for two reasons. First, today’s connected cars have so many rich content apps and services that everyone should have seamless access to as part of the in-car experience. Second, an intelligent automotive assistant is critical for the driver’s trust in a (semi-) autonomous vehicle – and that trust will be essential for the adoption of autonomous driving,” said Arnd Weil, senior vice president and general manager, Nuance Automotive. “These industry trends combined with consumer demand for access to the services and apps as part of their everyday life are what make Dragon Drive an incredibly unique solution for automakers, giving them the ability to deliver an intuitive and intelligent automotive assistant.”
