In-car voice tech set to get a massive boost from Google’s AI

Google’s generative AI is coming to a dashboard near you. The company appeared on stage at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit to announce the two have teamed up to bring AI smarts to future dashboards.

That’s pretty significant as while in-car tech is getting loads better, voice assistants are still quite simple. Qualcomm’s latest-gen in-car hardware (part of what it calls the Snapdragon Digital Chassis) is highly capable hardware that powers many connected cars, now with support for 4K displays (up to 16 of them, believe it or not) and even zonal audio so driver alerts don’t disturb passengers and vice versa.

The company announced Mercedes-Benz vehicles will use the new platform in the future.

But on the software side, things haven’t progressed as much as we thought they might by now – and we’re still seeing a bit of a power struggle between automakers and the ambitions of Apple CarPlay and Google’s own Android Auto. Of course, generative AI is the phrase of the moment and while nobody knows where the road will lead, it’s clear that it’s going to be key to all consumer tech going forward and that has to include the car.

At this stage, Google and Qualcomm are planning on developing a standardised way in which generative AI can be rolled out to vehicles using the Android OS.

It’s unlikely we’ll see the results in-car for a few years yet, but it’s clearly an ambition to speed up development cycles for in-car tech, too and the two companies said they would be using Google Cloud tech to power a lot of this tech in the background. Mostly this will manifest itself in the form of a voice assistant that can work alongside all the features of the car, but it’s also around safety features and real-time driver updates.

There will also be a part of the work looking at how updates can be rolled out over the lifetime of a car as technology changes.

During its Snapdragon Summit event, Qualcomm chief Cristiano Amon also said he couldn’t “think of an industry that has gone to bigger transformation”, something that’s set to continue.

“Now the car is the computing space”, continued Amon. “And besides the incredible new screens and digital cockpits that we have building [for cars, that’s also going to change with Gen AI. It is evolving – in addition to the amount of technology we’re building for cars – systems and autonomy into a whole different user experience.”

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