Beyond Voice
Voice & Beyond
The best in-car experience is one that makes interacting with your car as close to interacting with another human as possible: a multi-sensory experience in which voice, eye movements, and gestures are all part of the conversation.
And in the car of the future, where buttons are at a minimum and technology takes center stage, this simple, seamless interaction will be more important than ever.
With our decades of voice recognition expertise as the foundation, we’re entering a new era of understanding. In addition to voice, gaze, gesture and even handwriting take interacting with the automotive assistant to the next level and bring the outside world into the car. Look at a coffee shop and ask, “Does that shop have Wi-Fi?” Use gestures to bring turn-by-turn navigation to eye level on the windshield. Scribble a text message with the tip of your finger. Get a virtual tap on the shoulder when an emergency vehicle is approaching. It’s all part of a multi-modal experience that enables drivers to communicate with their cars just like they would with their friends.
Looking to the future, going far beyond voice to deliver a safe, productive, entertaining environment will be paramount. But don’t just take our word for it...hop in, we’ll take you there.
Cerence Exterior Vehicle Interaction
Imagine being able to turn on your car’s lights, close your trunk, park your car, and more – all by simply using your voice. No hands required, and with the utmost reliability and security.
Cerence Exterior Vehicle Interaction makes these seemingly futuristic interactions a reality. This suite of AI and voice-powered innovations combines speech recognition, natural language understanding, text-to-speech, speech signal enhancement, and voice biometrics with the growing number of exterior microphones on today’s cars to enable drivers to interact with their cars from the outside.
Cerence Exterior Vehicle Interaction is extraordinarily useful for today’s car owners and will be critical for the autonomous, shared vehicles of the future, giving users the ability to, for example, inquire about a shared, driverless vehicle’s planned route, anticipated delays, and more.
Cerence In-Car Communications
The car can be a noisy place. From the sounds of the road to competing entertainment and chatty co-pilots, extra noise can interfere with not just the automotive assistant, but even conversations between the driver and passengers. Passengers shout; drivers turn around to speak to passengers in the back, all increasing distraction and compromising safety on the road.
Enter Cerence In-Car Communication (ICC). Part of the Cerence Audio AI suite, ICC improves the speech quality and intelligibility of in-car conversations between the driver and passengers through an intercom system. Perfectly suited for larger vehicles like minibuses and vans where there are more than two rows of seats, ICC picks up speech from the driver through specially placed microphones, processes and cleans it up, and plays it over the speakers in the rear of the car – all in an instant.
Multi-Zone Intelligence
Part of the Cerence Audio AI suite and leveraged alongside Speech Signal Enhancement, our multi-seat intelligence technology enables everyone in the car to interact with the automotive assistant, without worry of interference or interruption.
Deep neural net-based noise reduction with superior noise suppression supports a new level of multi-zone, hands-free communication, with up to eight zones with a maximum of 30 microphones. It’s also equipped with up to 16 configurable output channels with flexible zone selection and multi-zone arbitration to support both the Cerence assistant and multiple third-party assistants.
Beyond interaction with the automotive assistant, multi-seat intelligence delivers an ideal solution for drivers taking phone calls on the road, enabling perfect suppression of interfering speech from other zones by combining beamforming with passenger interfering techniques. Pair that with the ability to enable and disable zones dynamically during a conference call, and you’ve got an entirely new in-car phone calling experience.
Cerence Emergency Vehicle Detection
When asked how in-car technology could best improve their driving experience in the future, nearly half of respondents to a Cerence survey said they are looking for greater assistance during stressful driving situations. Cerence Emergency Vehicle Detection (EVD) provides just that, integrating with the automotive assistant to alert drivers about approaching police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks so they can adapt their driving accordingly.
Cerence EVD uses existing microphones to accurately and reliably recognize a broad array of emergency siren signals and the direction they are coming from. Once a siren is identified, the volume of the radio or other media is lowered, and the driver is alerted visually via the headunit and via audio from the automotive assistant.
In many countries, it is required by law that drivers give way to emergency vehicles, and autonomous cars are required to detect and react to emergency vehicles as well. Cerence EVD addresses these regulations and will be critical to the cars of the future.
Gaze Detection
Cerence Look is designed to give the mobility assistant the intuition of a human copilot, enabling drivers and passengers to interact with points of interest outside the car. Using novel environment reconstruction, existing hardware, and car sensor data, Cerence Look arms the assistant with information about points of interest along a route and eliminates the need for users to manually search for information. Drivers can simply look at stores, restaurants and cafes, hotels, landmarks, and more and ask for contact information, hours, or even a rating. Look at a coffee shop and ask, “What is the name of that restaurant?” or “What is that café on my left?” for example.
Think of it like talking with a friend about the passing sights—a friend who happens to have advanced GPS, encyclopedic knowledge, and an inexhaustible memory for individual habits and preferences.
Text Input
With a long history in text input, Cerence delivers the iconic Cerence Swype keyboard for mobility applications, bringing a vast range of input options for simple, intuitive interactions between drivers and their cars.
Cerence Swype enables drivers to easily enter text in the new era of digital cars. This product family includes the classic “Swyping” method – where drivers slide their finger from one letter to the other in one continuous motion – as well as handwriting recognition and traditional keyboard tapping. When applied to mobility settings, Cerence Swype is powerful tool for entering addresses, searching for points of interest, accessing car functions and more, enabling safe, speedy interaction with the automotive assistant. Cerence Swype has been optimized for operation on the touch screens and touch pads that are commonplace in today’s cars, with necessary adjustments based on the position of the driver relative to the screen.
By bringing this technology to the car and with 15 million cars on the road with Cerence Swype, Cerence remains committed delivering the smartphone-like experience that OEMs today seek for their vehicles and for their drivers.