For the last week I have been testing the MBUX voice ‘smart assistant’, the new multimedia and interactive system that Daimler announced at CES in Las Vegas in January this year, which he taught at the Mobile World Congress in late February. Barcelona, and which was later integrated and marketed in the new Mercedes A-class. Get into the car, and check the two huge touch screens, with 3D graphics provided by NVIDIA, and the different customization options of the system are surprising since there is no other vehicle on the market, if we except Tesla models, which don’t even come close to it in this chapter.
I’m not going to talk about the MBUX, just about its voice recognition and how it interacts with the occupants of the car. I have always thought, and the data from analysts and consultants corroborate this, that the use of assistants on smartphones and Smart Homes is still not very relevant since they do little useful things and proactivity is conspicuous by its absence. Until they really integrate artificial intelligence (AI), which means dedicating greater processing, computing, storage capacities in the cloud, and introducing machine learning or machine learning so that they learn from the user, they will not be completely efficient. And then there is the processing of Natural Language or NLP.
And it is precisely this aspect that I have been able to verify these few days with the voice assistant of the MBUX (Mercedes Benz User Xperience). The truth is that the system integrated by Daimler has improved a lot compared to any other existing in the market in understanding the instructions that are given to it through the voice, thanks to the fact that Daimler have dedicated a large part of their efforts to understanding natural language. Processing that has been done in English, and then translated into a few languages, including Spanish. And it shows in the result. AI experts say that developing the system in the native language in which it will be used is not the same as translating it. And that detail reduces the precision with which you dialogue. NLP is one of the most complicated technologies to develop, and even more so in Spanish.
However, with the intelligent assistant in the new A-Class, it is no longer necessary to learn specific commands for the system to turn the air conditioning on or off or to search for a radio station. It is enough to say, for example, “I’m cold”, so that the integrated AI increases the temperature. Or it can be said that “I want to listen to Cadena Ser”, for example, so that it will tune in immediately. It can also read your short messages, not e-mails, and even reply to SMS by dictating the content you want to transmit.
However, the voice assistant of the MBUX lacks in my opinion a relevant characteristic so that it does not go ‘crazy’ in a cabin in which, for example, two adults and two children who, the latter, have the intention of ‘ play ‘with your new travel companion. It would be important to have a system in which the ‘voice print’ can be configured, as if it makes Google Home possible, so that the youngest occupants of the vehicle are not claiming from ‘Mercedes’ whatever comes to mind at all times, and thus avoid making it ‘stupid’, in addition to making the driver dizzy and distracting.
Being a pioneer, and Daimler has been with the MBUX and its intelligent voice assistant, has these disadvantages of youth, especially in natural language processing technology, but also has the competitive advantage of having been the first to develop a proprietary artificial intelligence system in the car, which will surely be refined in the coming months to integrate it into other models of the brand and make the dialogue between the machine and the driver more natural. Daimler, in addition, has not wanted to use or integrate other systems in its MBUX, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana.
The Mercedes Benz User Xperience and its intelligent vocal assistant is a breakthrough from what has been available until now. It will also be necessary to check if the intelligent systems that other brands intend to integrate, for example Seat should soon announce its first models with Amazon’s Alexa, and BMW in the first months of 2019 will begin to sell its new 3 series with its artificial intelligence to interact with the driver, they will mean a new advance in the usefulness of these systems, or if they continue to be ‘stupid’ and only reactive to what is asked of them.
In the case of Daimler, its voice assistant has been developed in California together with the startup SoundHound, a competitor of Shazam, and specialized in the use of AI for music recommendation. Both have provided local processing to many of the requests made to the vehicle, although they also use cloud services so that the information that is derived to the user is the most recent. Undoubtedly, the new versions of the MBUX virtual assistant will improve the interaction between driver and car, especially if the natural language in which it is developed is native to the country in which it is to be used. Also the use of it, added to the automatic learning or machine learning that integrates the MBUX will allow more and more the car to be truly ‘smart’.
