Consumers want in-car assistants that speak with AI

dragdrivenuanceA recent consumer survey conducted by Nuance showed that drivers would love more assistance behind the wheel with a more intelligent, proactive in-car system.

  • 65% of respondents stated they would like an in-car assistant to learn from their past behavior and apply it to future interactions for a better user experiences.
  • 35% of respondents stated they wanted their car to remember their preferences on road, while 39% want their car to remember their preferred routes.
  • 41% stated they would like an assistant to help with them travel and route planning, while 26% of respondents noted they would like their car to remember preferences on dining, gas stations and parking on their journey.

Nuance announced its Contextual Reasoning Framework, a new cloud-based service within the Dragon Drive connected car framework that leverages AI to deliver contextualized and personalized recommendations for navigation, dining, gas stations, points of interest (POI) and other domains. The service can be integrated across a variety of Dragon Drive’s Domain applications designed specifically for the in-car experience, and is entirely accessible through a conversational user interface or haptic feedback where appropriate

How Dragon Drive’s Contextual Reasoning works

The Contextual Reasoning Framework leverages Nuance’s advancements in Artificial Intelligence to exploit domain knowledge in a context-sensitive manner to provide a more intelligent experience behind the wheel.

A core element of Nuance’s Automotive Assistant offering, the new Contextual Reasoning Framework can proactively provide information and make recommendations by performing reasoning on a large repository of knowledge, in combination with a driver’s preferences, location and situational context, and the data from the car’s sensors. Each entry of the knowledge repository can range over general, spatial and temporal knowledge, domain-specific knowledge about parking, fuel stations, and information specific to certain geographic markets and vehicle characteristics. Thousands of knowledge entries can be combined based on the needs of the automakers and its consumers.

“Today’s cars both access and generate a large amount of purposeful data that, when leveraged in the right way, can create a highly personalized and intelligent driving experience,” said Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer, Nuance. “We’re applying our latest advances in AI reasoning to automotive data and drivers’ personal preferences, to give in-car systems the ability to make thoughtful recommendations – just as a collaborative human assistant would.”

For example, the service can also help plan a journey, offering restaurant recommendations and suggesting the closest parking area according to weather, time of day, parking availability, vehicle characteristics and driver preferences on distance from the location, costs and more. From there, the information is served up to Dragon Drive’s navigation service to provide the navigation route to the parking area – as well as proactively play the driver’s favorite music or news content based on the time of day, or the passengers in the car. The service can also concurrently source a variety of data to proactively find the closest fuel station when the car is running out of gas. By leveraging the driver’s preferences and contextual data, the results returned by the in-car system are incredibly relevant and personalized, minimizing driver distraction and simplifying the overall infotainment experience.

“Contextual reasoning brings to bear our vision for an automotive assistant that is fully optimized for the in-car experience,” said Arnd Weil, senior vice president and general manager, Nuance Automotive. “We’re applying AI to one of the most complex challenges – an intelligent connected car that is conversational, intelligent, proactive and safer to engage. Further, our reasoning engine is fully integrated with other applications and services that matter to drivers – navigation, parking, traffic, in-car diagnostics, music, POI, and more, giving automakers an AI-driven platform that they can fully customize as part of their own branded experience.”

Availability

Dragon Drive’s Contextual Reasoning Framework is available to automotive OEMs and suppliers through select Dragon Drive Smart Domains applications and its Automotive professional services as part of a holistic connected car solution that delivers speech, natural language understanding, dialog, content, and AI.

Dragon Drive

Dragon Drive offers a level of user experience unmatched by aftermarket third party mobile phone solutions or solutions relying on cloud-based speech technology alone. Nuance’s unique hybrid voice capabilities provide drivers with a safer, smarter way to access apps and services, across more than 40 different languages.