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The trend of large touchscreens in cars has left many longing for the not-so-distant days when most user interactions occurred using physical buttons. But Wassim Bin Saeed, chief software officer at Rivian, believes the use of buttons in a car is an “anomaly.”
“It’s a bug. It’s not a feature,” Ben Saeed said Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “Ideally, you would want to interact with your car through voice. The problem today is that most voice assistants are broken.
To that end, Ben Said said he drives around “every week” an engineering vehicle with an AI voice assistant, though he didn’t specify which one. He previously mentioned in his interview with TechCrunch transportation editor Kirsten Korosec that Rivian has “partnerships that I can’t talk about yet.”
“I think the car is actually a great environment for artificial intelligence,” he said, noting that latency and hallucinations are still very big problems that need to be solved.
“My last thought is that voice (controls) has become the primary means of interacting with the car. “The truth is that the car is so feature-rich that even if we do a great job on the UI, there will always be priorities that we have to do in terms of having things on the list.” One or two pillars behind her,” Ben Saeed told TechCrunch afterward. He got off the stage.
Bin Saeed also said that he is a strong believer in the ability of AI-powered voice controls to handle complex requests. For example, he said, if a driver says “I’m hungry,” an in-car assistant should be able to quickly direct him to a nearby restaurant he might like.
This is not a terribly new idea. Automakers like Mercedes-Benz have spent years offering a seamless in-car voice control experience, with mixed results. But Bin Saeed said Rivian’s goal is to enable every touchscreen to be controlled and made available by voice.
Before any of that happens, Bin Saeed said he remains focused on offering a personalized experience for Rivian owners — which means CarPlay won’t be showing up anytime soon. While he said the team inside Rivian is “continuing to discuss that,” he said on stage that he thinks leveraging CarPlay is “lazy” and that he prefers integrating certain apps, like Apple Music.
CarPlay “takes over all the pixels in the screen, it’s a replacement for the entire experience, and we really believe that with the technical capabilities that we have, we can deliver a more accurate and integrated experience,” he said.
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