There is no doubt that the technology in our cars is very often outdated compared to the user experience offered by modern smartphones, with a few exceptions. The voice assistants of car manufacturers, very useful while driving so as not to take your eyes off the road, are for example generally less efficient than those of GAFAM. This notably pushed Renault and Volvo to adopt Android Automotive OS as an operating system, in order to take advantage of the Google Assistant in particular.
Other manufacturers want to offer even more interaction possibilities by integrating ChatGPT into their cars. General Motors and Mercedes looked into the subject first and DS Automobiles is currently the only brand to offer ChatGPT on board its cars in Europe.
Serial integration in the second quarter of 2024
It is now Volkswagen’s turn to adopt OpenAI’s conversational AI tool, with operation similar to that of the system at DS. Thus, at CES 2024, Volkswagen announces that the IDA voice assistant in its cars on the MEB and MQB EVO platform (ID.7, ID.3, ID.4 and ID.5, as well as the latest generations of Tiguan and Passat and that the restyled Golf) will soon rely on ChatGPT, via the Cerence Chat Pro solution from Volkswagen partner Cerence. The launch of this solution is planned for the second quarter of 2024, but it is not known whether it will be offered to models already released from the factory, free of charge or not.
Operation is promised to be clear for the user, who can call the voice assistant with the keyword “Hello IDA”, or by pressing a button on the steering wheel. Depending on its request, the car can process it on its own, to activate a vehicle command or even search for a destination, or transmit it to the AI. The response will then be transcribed with the same voice and may concern a much broader field of action. “The application could be useful during car journeys, in particular to enrich conversations, answer questions, interact in natural language, obtain information about the vehicle, all while keeping your hands on the wheel”explains Volkswagen, without really detailing specific use cases.
Furthermore, the brand specifies that “ChatGPT does not access any vehicle data; questions and answers are immediately deleted for optimal information protection”. Volkswagen and Cerence do not indicate on which version of the LLM (large language model) the system is based. As a reminder, DS and its partner SoundHound opted for GPT-3.5, because it is faster than GPT-4, but also less advanced.