At CES, the BMW Group and Amazon showcase voice assistant LLM capabilities based on a current development project that the companies are working on in preparation for a potential series rollout. This makes the BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant the ultimate vehicle expert thanks to generative AI that is powered by the Alexa LLM. At CES, visitors experience how the voice assistant provides quick instructions and answers about vehicle functions in a much more human, conversation-like manner, while at the same time being able to control some vehicle functions.
The BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant has been using artificial intelligence for speech processing for a long time and this demo is the latest proof point of the continued innovation BMW and its partners are bringing to customers. Complex processing capabilities, which enable human-like interactions and dialogs, have not yet been integrated into BMW series vehicles. Such capabilities are now made possible by LLMs, which are AI models that are designed to process human language at a high level and generate responses accordingly. The BMW Group is also taking careful steps to build a safe and trusted experience for customers, and continues to test and iterate these LLM capabilities over time with its partners.
Since the introduction of the first BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant in 2018, language interaction has been an essential part of BMW iDrive. Today, the voice assistant gives customers control over many vehicle functions so that they can keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. Leveraging Amazon’s Alexa Custom Assistant — a solution that is based on Alexa technology and enables companies to create their own customized voice assistant — the next-generation of the BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant will soon become more powerful over the course of the year in vehicles with BMW Operating System 9.
