Certain Kia car owners will soon be able to play music and make phone calls, all by just the sound of their voice.
Kia Motors' new infotainment system "Uvo powered by Microsoft" will let car owners access its key features by voice as well as by touch. With an assist from Microsoft speech technology and an embedded version of Windows, Uvo will help drivers and passengers make and answer phone calls, respond to text messages, and play music from different sources, said Kia.
Using Microsoft's voice recognition, car owners will be able to direct the system by issuing short voice commands rather searching through complex menus, said Kia. Drivers and passengers can scroll through their music lists and phone books by voice or via the touch screen.
For greater accuracy, speech recognition profiles can be created and trained for two different voices from among a variety of languages. The system can even respond to questions, such as "What's playing?" so that drivers don't have to fumble or take their eyes off the road.
... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog
Volkswagen is trying out new ideas with this infotainment system.
(Credit: CNET)
Far from corporate headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, the engineers at Volkswagen's Electronic Research Laboratory (ERL) take advantage of their proximity to high-tech companies such as Apple, Intel, and Google to develop new infotainment systems and interfaces for VW cars. We got a look at ERL's latest work, a system developed with Intel called the Global Open Research Infotainment Architecture, or GLORIA.
ERL Senior Engineer Eric Jensen walked us through the latest interface built on GLORIA. The test system we saw relied on a touch screen for all input, although a production system might use some hard buttons on the edges of the screen. But unlike standard touchscreen applications, this system allows for multitouch, making gesture control, similar to that used on the iPhone, possible. Jensen demonstrated tracing a lower-case 'h' with his fingertip on the display, which caused the system to bring up the home screen. Similarly, tracing an 'n' brought up the navigation screen.
In this development stage, the system had applications for navigation and music, but Jensen explained that it could serve as a platform for third-party developers to build useful widgets that could be installed by the end user. This model would be similar to how iPhone owners can load apps from iTunes.
Jensen pointed out that most automotive interface designers believe voice command will be the ultimate control paradigm, but until natural language processing advances, touch screens make the most sense. The system we saw was under heavy development, and would probably find its way into a production car in three years, at the earliest.
The competition between Microsoft and open-source software reaches into the automotive space with the announcement of a new alliance among automakers and technology providers called Genivi. The goal of the alliance is to build a Linux stack that will provide a common architecture for automotive infotainment systems.
At the same time, Microsoft announces version 4.0 of its own automotive platform, on which Ford's Sync and Fiat's Blue & Me systems are based. The new Microsoft platform now supports Intel chip architecture and includes what Microsoft calls "common head unit functionality," meaning that the platform comes with standard modules for integrating CD playback and ripping, along with other applications.
Version 4.0 supports a common voice command structure that works for typical car applications, such as navigation and Bluetooth cell phone integration, so users won't have to go back to a top-level tree structure to issue commands for different in-car applications.
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