Plaza BMW

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

BMW To Offer Voice Control in Certain Cars

It is not quite “Kitt”, the artificially-intelligent car from David Hasselhoff’s 1980s “Knight Rider” TV series. But it is getting closer.

German automaker BMW is introducing Nuance’s Dragon Drive technology to its luxury 7 Series vehicles and some of its 3 Series starting this summer. The service pairs with the driver’s smartphone, as Information Week explains:

Dragon Drive! Messaging is a platform-level service that integrates fully with the on-board navigation computer of the car. It lets drivers speak, listen, edit, and respond to text messages and emails. Using commands, drivers can even format emails, dictating punctuation, new paragraphs, new lines, and more.

Beyond messaging, Dragon Drive! messaging and BMW’s Navigation System Professional together let drivers issue other commands, such as calling contacts or navigating to specific addresses.

Presumably eventually it will be able to work with something similar to Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant. For now, however, the purported aim is safety, as the system enables BMW drivers to keep their hands on the wheel while communicating between meetings. Although, in some jurisdictions, it is illegal to use even hands-free devices while driving.

This isn’t the first time BMW has partnered with a mobile technology company in its cars.

Several years ago it showed off Bluetooth technology in conjunction with Research In Motion’s Blackberry. With certain BlackBerry models and certain BMW models, drivers were able to listen to their text messages and emails, which were spoken to them by their car. The service didn’t include voice dictation, however.

BMW is just the latest automaker to provide such services. Perhaps the most well known is Ford Sync and My Ford Touch, which offers a library of 10,000 voice commands.