Fiat Chrysler Will Use Cerence Voice Recognition Tech in All Vehicles
Fiat Chrysler (FCA) vehicles will use voice recognition technology built by artificial intelligence for cars developer Cerence. Cerence’s software will be integrated into the Uconnect 5 platform built into FCA cars.
Jeep Speak
The announcement marks the first time that FCA will include Cerence into all of its vehicles. Though Cerence’s software will be powering the voice recognition aspect of the platform, the actual wake word will be whatever the brand of the vehicle, such as “Hey Chrysler,” or “Hey Jeep,” as it did before. The updated version of the car’s native voice assistant will be updated wirelessly, one of the features added to the Uconnect 5 when it came out in January.
“The Uconnect experience remains one of the most forward-looking multimedia and infotainment systems on the market today, and the latest updates made available by the release of Uconnect 5 are a significant step forward for FCA,” Cerence CEO Sanjay Dhawan said in a statement. “We are incredibly proud of our long-term partnership with FCA and are committed to continuing our work together to design, develop and implement advanced, conversational voice recognition in the car.”
Uconnect 5 is built on a modified version of the Android operating system. Owners can set up profiles for different drivers, changing the voice assistant preferences as well as radio buttons, mirror angles, and seating height. Along with the native voice assistant that Cerence is part of, Uconnect 5 integrates the Amazon Alexa voice assistant as an option in the car. The system can also run Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from smartphones, Uconnect 5 can even run two voice assistants at a time from different smartphones.
Cerence Accelerates
FCA is a big name for Cerence, but the company has been growing and adding new partners and features at a steady clip. Last month, Cerene came out with the Cognitive Arbitrator, which lets cars offer multiple voice assistants simultaneously while automatically directing requests to the one best-suited to the task. That’s just a couple of months after coming out with a feature to customize car voice assistants called My Car, My Voice. As an additional partnership enticement, the company recently launched Cerence UX Services to aid car manufacturers in testing and upgrading vehicle AI. With total in-car voice assistant users in the U.S. rising 13.7% in 15 months to nearly 130 million, according to recent Voicebot research, Cerence will want to be in as many new vehicle voice assistants as possible. According to Cerence, close to 300 million cars on the road use its platform in some form.
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