Google and Volkswagen have partnered to include cutting-edge AI in a mobile app made just for Volkswagen drivers.
Abdallah Shanti, Chief Information Officer for Volkswagen Group of America confirmed the partnership in a press release on Tuesday.
The cutting-edge in-app assistant uses smartphone cameras to convey pertinent information from the dashboard of the car and lets Volkswagen customers ask useful enquiries, including how to fix a flat tyre.
Together with the company’s cloud computing infrastructure, Google’s Gemini big language models—which are skilled at comprehending and producing responses that resemble those of a human—power this feature.
The new AI assistant was created using data from Volkswagen, including YouTube maintenance tutorials and owner’s manuals for the company’s cars. The YouTube videos and VW’s data are uploaded to Gemini.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, underlined the project’s intricacy and pointed out that there are significant technological obstacles in merging different data kinds, such as text, photographs, and videos.
About 120,000 owners of the Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport models will have access to the helper, and by early next year, more vehicles will be added to the program starting with the 2020 model year. This might have a big effect on the cloud computing business, where Google is now ranked third, after Microsoft and Amazon.
“We’re driven to introduce new technologies and features that enhance the ownership experience for all of our Volkswagen customers and create love for our vehicles,” said Abdallah.
“AI is emerging as a utility tool for Volkswagen owners to better understand their vehicles and get answers to questions faster and easier. Thanks to our strong collaboration with Google Cloud, we’re able to bring valuable technology into our vehicles that help us successfully connect to the car and our customers.”
We earlier reported that Hyundai Motor of South Korea and Alphabet’s Waymo, the latter’s autonomous vehicle business, are allegedly in talks to share the manufacture of the latter’s next generation of self-driving vehicles.
