What’s your experience of in-car voice recognition technology? If it’s anything like ours you probably find these systems incredibly frustrating because the interactions happen too slowly and the car only ever understands half of the commands you bark at it.
But that could be about to change. Toyota says it is leveraging the power of the latest AI technologies to drastically improve the voice recognition user experience for drivers, promising much faster response times and suggestions from the car tailored to the driver’s situation and preferences.
We’ve heard automakers trumpet their new voice recognition systems before only to find them still annoying to use when we’ve tried them for ourselves. But Toyota promises its next system’s Arene OS will be able to handle a whopping 200 vehicle functions and will make the driver feel like “they were talking to an operator.” By which we hope it doesn’t mean you have to sit on hold for 10 minutes to speak to someone and then get cut off the moment you get to the front of the line.
We don’t have a detailed timeframe as to when this tech might make it to the showroom, but Toyota’s assertion that it will be fitted to the firm’s “next global volume production model” suggests we won’t have long to wait.
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But the Arene OS’s AI capabilities go far beyond simply making it easier for us to turn the infotainment system’s volume up without lifting a finger. Toyota also says it will improve the design and development process of new cars, by generating design ideas that take aerodynamic and other engineering constraints into account to save human designers time, and thereby shorten the design process. Toyota says the AI system will collaborate with the designer, and it could be a useful tool. On the other hand, it could be about to put them out of a job…
On a happier note, Toyota says the Arene OS will be instrumental in making its fake-manual EV idea a reality, controlling throttle and clutch functions to “provide the fun of driving a manual transmission car even with a BEV.” And Toyota also says AI will enable it to create multiple EVs with entirely different characteristics and personalities from one BEV base by tweaking the driving feel and sound through software updates.