With the latest AI technology coming to Volkswagen cars, you could soon be able to use voice commands to defrost your windshield or ask for advice on how to rekindle your love life.
The German automaker announced at CES 2024 a partnership with Cerence, a company that builds voice-controlled interfaces for cars using artificial intelligence technology called a large language model (LLM). Cerence’s Chat Pro combines its own LLM that’s been trained to handle thousands of auto-related questions and tasks with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the general-purpose LLM that propelled AI into mainstream awareness in 2022.
With that approach, Cerence’s in-house LLM will field commands like “Turn on the cabin lights” and questions like “Where is the car battery?” that you might otherwise need to find in the owner’s manual. If the Cerence LLM can’t handle a question — who are the presidents portrayed on Mount Rushmore, or what are the most common crops in California’s Central Valley, for example — it hands it off to ChatGPT. The companies envision it’ll make cars easier to use and more entertaining.
The deal means the AI technology will be available for some VW cars in North America and Europe, including the company’s Golf models, its ID.71, ID.4, ID.5 and ID.3 electric vehicles, and its new Tiguan3 and the new Passat3 models. The companies didn’t detail a timeline or pricing, but the technology will be released to new and existing cars on the road through an over-the-air software update.
The partnership shows how eager companies are to cash in on the excitement around AI. Although general-purpose AI chatbots like ChatGPT can bungle factual information, issuing answers that are plausible but incorrect, they also can be entertaining and useful for tasks like brainstorming. And VW sees it as essential to building more tech muscle into cars.
“With software at the core of the Volkswagen of the future, it’s critical that we quickly deploy meaningful innovation powered by advancements in AI,” said Thomas Ulbrich, an executive leading VW’s New Mobility program.
Cerence gets access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology through a partnership with Microsoft.