LAS VEGAS — ChatGPT-enabled voice assistants in Volkswagen cars will be able to interact with users back and forth by the middle of this year, Volkswagen announced Monday during a technology presentation in Las Vegas.
Volkswagen announced at the electronics trade show CES the first vehicles equipped with ChatGPT, which will go on sale to customers in North America and Europe from the beginning of the second quarter of this year.
According to Volkswagen and Cerence executives, AI recognizes a variety of requests, from raising the temperature when it hears “It's cold'' to directing it to the nearest Indian restaurant when it hears “I want butter chicken.'' They say they can handle it. Technical partnership with Volkswagen.
Customers can now adjust their vehicle's functions without touching a button, Kai Gruenitz, director of technology development at the Volkswagen brand, told Reuters on the sidelines of the CES trade show.
“Our customers don't want to manually adjust their seats… They want to use a voice interaction system,” he said.
Volkswagen said it was the first mass-produced manufacturer to equip its compact segment vehicles with this technology as standard equipment.
General Motors announced last March that it was working on developing a virtual personal assistant using the AI model behind ChatGPT.
Last June, Mercedes-Benz launched a test program that would allow ChatGPT to be downloaded into some 900,000 vehicles equipped with the automaker's MBUX system, eventually allowing users to watch movies while behind the wheel. It is expected that users will be able to perform tasks such as making restaurant reservations.
