Toronto, Ontario — Volkswagen’s voice assistant will be integrating ChatGPT into its cars to converse with drivers in a back-and-forth dialogue by the middle of the year, the automaker said on Monday.
Volkswagen presented its first vehicle featuring ChatGPT at the CES electronics trade fair in Las Vegas, Nevada, and said that the feature will be available for customers in North America and Europe from early in the second quarter of this year.
According to executives from Volkswagen and Cerence (CRNC.0), who partnered with the automaker on the tech, drivers will be able to ask ChatGPT features such as raising the temperature of the cabin when it hears the phrase, “I’m feeling cold,” and showing drivers specific restaurants upon requests for specific food items.
“Customers can now adjust functionalities from their vehicle without touching a button,” Kai Gruenitz, the Volkswagen brand’s board member for technical development, originally told Rueters on the sidelines of the CES trade fair.
“Our customers don’t want to manually adjust their seats, they want to use speech dialogue systems,” Gruenitz further explained.
“So if you have Apple CarPlay or Android or something, you are not able to adjust functionalities inside of the vehicle. That’s the next step. I think what our customers are really looking for is seamless, intuitive usage of their car.”
Volkswagen said it was the first volume manufacturer to make the technology a standard feature in its compact segment cars. General Motors said last March it was working on a virtual personal assistant using AI models behind ChatGPT.
Mercedes-Benz ran a test program last June enabling around 900,000 vehicles which had the automaker’s “MBUX” system to download ChatGPT, with the view of users eventually being able to carry out tasks like making movie or restaurant reservations from behind the wheel.
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