Mercedes adds ChatGPT to its cars to make them chattier
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ChatGPT is your new road trip buddy – if you own a Mercedes.
In the latest installment of ChatGPT-ifying everything, Mercedes-Benz is taking the AI chatbot for a spin.
Starting Friday, Mercedes drivers can participate in a beta program that uses ChatGPT in the luxury car company’s voice control system, MBUX. ChatGPT’s natural language understanding will expand the voice assistant’s range of topics it can respond to, and means drivers can have back-and-forth conversations with the chatbot.
Users will experience a voice assistant that not only accepts natural voice commands but can also conduct conversations. Soon, participants who ask the Voice Assistant for details about their destination, to suggest a new dinner recipe, or to answer a complex question, will receive a more comprehensive answer – while keeping their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.
“Participants who ask the Voice Assistant for details about their destination, to suggest a new dinner recipe, or to answer a complex question, will receive a more comprehensive answer – while keeping their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road,” said the announcement(opens in a new tab).
Getting travel information or making dinner plans en route may be what Mercedes-Benz has in mind for the beta program, but we’re already wondering if drivers will start using ChatGPT as a travel buddy to pass the time during long lonely drives. Either way, adding ChatGPT to the luxury vehicles definitely falls in the category of superfluous new toys for rich people. Put another way, the new feature is part of the company’s overarching goal of “making our cars the centre of our customers’ digital lives,” said Markus Schafer, CTO and board member in the announcement.
To participate in the three-month beta program, customers can sign up through the Mercedes app or say “Hey Mercedes, I want to join the beta program.” The feature is powered by Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure, which is partnered with OpenAI. That said, Mercedes-Benz retains the customer data which is anonymized and analyzed by the company for insights and future development of the program.
The voice command data collected is stored in the Mercedes-Benz Intelligent Cloud, where it is anonymised and analysed. Mercedes-Benz developers will gain helpful insights into specific requests, enabling them to set precise priorities in the further development of voice control. Findings from the beta programme will be used to further improve the intuitive voice assistant and to define the rollout strategy for large language models in more markets and languages.
