Odds are you’ve at least heard of Pixar’s 2006 animated film Cars. There’s a chance you even know of KITT, the Pontiac Trans AM from the 80s television show Knight Rider starring David Hasselhoff. Hell, you might have heard about Herbie, the talking Volkswagen Beetle from Disney’s 1969 film The Love Bug. But, talking cars are not a thing of fantasy anymore, they’re very much real.
BMW has chosen Nuance Communications as their voice recognition software company of choice for their BMW 7 Series luxury sedans, BMW 3 Series Touring and ActiveHybrid. The German automaker is the first to incorporate Nuance’s Dragon Drive software, a new voice command and control platform.
The days of basic car-to-speech recognition days are over. Telling your car to play music, control the temperature, or answer an incoming call is so two years ago. The Burlington-based company looks to raise the bar by not only utilizing these basic environmental functions, but Dragon Drive taps into Nuance servers via the cloud allowing users the ability to receive speech-transcribed emails and SMS while also having the functionality to dictate, edit, format and send messages by simply opening their mouth and flapping their vocal cords.
In order for Nuance to have achieved this, they partnered with Verizon’s 4G Venture Forum for Connected Cars — a group of automotive manufacturers teamed with Verizon who look to expand on the innovation of 4G LTE system.
What does this all mean, exactly? To put it broadly, you can have a conversation with your BMW or with other people through your BMW. I know what you’re thinking: “This sounds a lot like Siri.” Well, you’re right. Mike Thompson, GM of Nuance’s mobile division, noted in a recent interview with Gigaom.com, “There is a Siri-like effect sweeping across all product categories. … There’s a huge demand for it in automotive.”
Siri, in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, is an iOS app that acts as a personal assistant/ knowledge navigator. Its purpose is to answer inquiries and make recommendations, but Siri might be better known by millenials because it will attempt to answer even the most juvenile of questions.
According to the press release, Dragon Drive will be available this month and be accessible in six languages: English (U.S. and U.K.), French, Italian, German, and Spanish. BMW drivers also have the option to test Dragon Drive by signing up for a free 60-day trial.
It’s not hard to imagine that technology is rapidly advancing to the point where people won’t even have to drive their cars; they’ll simply drive themselves. In the meantime, talking BMWs are a viable substitute. Who needs friends when you have a Beamer? We can only speculate what Nuance and other tech giants have in store for the automotive industry. I mean what could possibly be next, flying cars?
