BMW Integrates Smart Assistant Alexa Into Cars
Smart Assistants are being everything for everyone everywhere. They are on our phones, PC’s, smartwatches and now even in our cars. Though we might be familiar with using the assistants on our phones, using them in cars is still a new thing for many out there. Well, BMW wants to change that.
In a few days, BMW will be rolling out Amazon’s Alexa in their cars. BMW was already looking into potential assistants that they could put in their cars and seems that the car has finalized on Amazon’s Alexa. This service will soon be rolled out to Germany, Austria, U.S and the U.K. The feature will be rolled out to other countries at a further date.
This new feature would not just be found in the car as an option, but the feature would be well integrated with the car, and the service goes very well with the car. This enhances the overall experience of the car and the feature is equipped with many new features as well. BMW has worked with the Alexa team and now the team is also able to integrate virtual responses from Alexa.
Integrated Features
Alexa would function on the tablet-like display that is found in the center console of many new BMW’s, and the service is equipped to show additional information other than just voice. The service would be so seamless that using the service on the BMW would be more like using an Echo Show than just an Echo Dot.
BMW also ran a whole demo to show how the service would go with the car, and a 2015 BMW X5 was used to showcase the feature. In the demo, the display activates when information was asked about the weather, and answers from Wikipedia were shown when questions were asked.
UI Changes
BMW also changed the way the service looks, and so now when the weather is shown it is not as how Alexa would usually show the information, but the UI is tweaked to show the information in a more minimal manner, and the new feature has also been streamlined.
Though all this looks good for consumers, it might not be so for Amazon. BMW acts like the proxy in the middle, and so sometimes the queries return might seem a bit lagged. But this also a good thing because the queries are first sent to BMW’s queries and it’s only then sent to Amazon’s servers. BMW also serves as a blanket protection and so there is a control over the data, and the user’s privacy is also ensured.
Alexa is not the only service in the car, though. There is also the default built-in speech recognition service, and so to activate Alexa, one would have to add “Alexa” at the beginning of the sentence. The voice recognition software recognizes that and then activates Alexa. It is clear that BMW has done its best in integrating Alexa.
BMW is also rumored to be working with Microsoft to integrate Cortana too. That also hints that the car would also be considering to integrate Cortana into the car too. And so it would not be that wild to imagine a future when both personal assistants can be called upon.
