Android Auto has been in our cars for a
couple of years now, Google has been making it a bigger deal as of late, but
what’s the next step for technology in the car? The answer might just be Alexa
and/or Google Assistant. We’ve spent the better part of this past week with
Ford’s Fusion Energi sedan, and it’s one of a handful of vehicles in their
fleet that have Alexa support already – the rest of their fleet will get it
before the end of the year.
This was announced back at CES last month in
Las Vegas, we didn’t get a chance to demo it there, but we have been spending
the past week with it, and it’s definitely promising. When you think about it,
it doesn’t seem like something you must have, but once you start using it, it’s
pretty incredible.
We’ve written up a piece about setting up
Alexa and Ford’s SYNC3 service together. It takes a bit of time (actually, it’s
only time consuming if you haven’t set up the MyFord Mobile app), but it’s
pretty straightforward. Once you have them integrated you can use Alexa in the
car as well as in your home to control your car.
So while you’re at home, you can ask Alexa to
find out what the charge status is on your vehicle, this is particularly
helpful for those with plug-in hybrids like the Fusion Energi, as Alexa will
tell you the charge status, so you can see if you are close to being fully
charged or not.
You can also ask Alexa for your odometer
reading. This is actually really helpful. If you use your car for work, you can
write off mileage on your taxes, or get reimbursed from your boss, and not
needing to run out to your car to check the odometer reading is really nice.
The skill that those in the northern part of
the US will love, is the fact that Alexa can start your car. Now, I tried this
from home, with the car parked over a mile away, and it was still able to start
the car.
It took a few minutes to do it, but it did
start, which was pretty sweet. And it means you can tell Alexa to start your
car when you’re about to head out of the house in the morning to go to work,
and step into a nice and warm car. Of course, you can also do simple things
like asking Alexa to lock or unlock the car.
With the rise of personal assistant chatbots,
the tools required for organizations to build their own assistants are being
moved to the cloud to give developers the ability to leverage these
technologies in their products.
Foremost among these tools is Amazon Lex, the
speech recognition and natural language processing technology that powers the
Alexa virtual assistant, used in the Amazon Echo speaker and Fire TV digital
media player. Now using Alexa from your home for your car is pretty cool, but
you can also use her in the car.
Just press the voice button on your steering
wheel and you can ask her to do things like turn off the lights at home, or
open the garage door. This is where investing in a smart home can definitely
come in handy. Of course, you can also ask her things like what the score was
in last night’s game, or what the current news headlines are.
Finally, you can have her start playing your
most recent audio book from Audible. It’s all really simple, and it means that
you can keep your hands on the steering wheel and eyes on the road, which is
why Alexa is so important.
Now while we’ve been using the Ford Fusion
with Alexa built in, you can do these same things with the Google Assistant,
which Hyundai has built into their Blue Link system. Now Hyundai’s isn’t
actually out yet, but they were demoing it at CES 2017.
It’s pretty similar, but Google Assistant
doesn’t have as many integrations as Alexa just yet, but it will. One place
where the Google Assistant excels is in queries. Since the Google Assistant has
Google behind it, it means that you can ask it just about anything and it’ll
return an accurate answer. Whereas Alexa may not understand everything you ask.
Do we need Alexa or Google Assistant in our
car? Probably not. But it is definitely a nice experience. Who thought that we
would have Amazon or Google in our car, just a few years ago? Likely not many
people, but it’s in a good way, seeing as they aren’t showing us ads why we are
driving, which is a good thing. At least not yet.
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