BMW to introduce its own in-car voice assistant next year

Where car manufacturers have teamed with firms behind virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant, BMW took a different approach by announcing to launch its own voice assistant.

Car manufacturer BMW announced that it will launch its own in-car voice-controlled digital assistant via which users can change radio or adjust lighting without even lifting a finger. The ‘Intelligent Personal Assistant’ will be available in the company’s latest operating system version 7.0 initiating next year in March, reported The Verge.

For accessing the assistant, people will only have to say ‘Hey BMW’ and it will wake up the assistant. The prompt can be personalized so that assistant can be given its own name as well. The assistant will remember the driver’s favorite settings and can also trigger a combination of them to make the riders more comfortable.

By just saying, “Hey BMW, I’m too cold,” will make the temperature go down. The assistant is even programmed to respond to driver’s questions like, “What’s the meaning of life”. By saying, “Hey BMW, I feel tired,” will adjust the lighting mood, temperature and music among other things. Ordering, “Hey BMW, take me home,” will navigate drivers back to their houses.

Users can also question the assistant as to how the automatic high beam works, if the oil level is enough or whether there are any current warnings. Drivers can also give it access to their calendars to get updates about when they should leave for a scheduled appointment. BMW says that in the future, the assistant will be able to alert drivers to possible issues, like tire pressure being low, share fuel-saving tips and arrange appointments with a service center, wrote Engadget.

The German automaker says that the assistant will be advanced continuously in order to enable it to do much more. According to BMW, its Intelligent Personal Assistant will play nice with other digital assistants in the future, ‘thereby providing a link to other rapidly growing ecosystems’.

This initiative by BMW makes it join Mercedes-Benz in not using the usual digital assistants by Amazon, Microsoft or Google and making their own unique assistants instead.

The Intelligent Personal Assistant will initially be available in 23 languages in the US, Germany, the UK, Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Brazil and Japan. It will also launch in China in May 2019.