Nuance Announces Dragon Drive Automotive Assistant with AI and Interoperability

Nuance Communications has recently announced that its Dragon Drive artificial intelligence (AI) platform for the connected car now features expanded conversational and cognitive capabilities for its Automotive Assistant to provide drivers and passengers with the ability to ask for navigation, music, content and other in-car features just by speaking. The company said Dragon Drive is also expanding car-to-home and home-to-car interoperability for automakers with the ability to create their own customized in-car infotainment features that can talk to and control smart home systems and applications.

Dragon Drive is designed to interact with passengers in each seat through a combination of its automotive-grade signal enhancement and acoustics innovation with voice-biometrics, ambient wake-up, hybrid embedded-cloud speech recognition and natural language understanding, and text-to-speech. Dragon Drive function is powered by Nuance’s machine learning and contextual reasoning to create an AI platform for the connected car.

Nuance also plans to use Dragon Drive to advance its vision for car-to-home and home-to-car interoperability with a flexible platform that allows the automotive assistant to easily with third-party apps and services such as lighting, security and other smart home hub services, giving drivers and passengers the ability to stay connected to the car and the home no matter where they are.

“Giving automakers the ability to integrate a central, customized automotive assistant is essential for two reasons.  First, today’s connected cars have so many rich content apps and services that everyone should have seamless access to as part of the in-car experience.  Second, an intelligent automotive assistant is critical for the driver’s trust in a (semi-) autonomous vehicle – and that trust will be essential for the adoption of autonomous driving,” said Arnd Weil, SVP and GM, Nuance Automotive.  “These industry trends combined with consumer demand for access to the services and apps as part of their everyday life are what make Dragon Drive an incredibly unique solution for automakers, giving them the ability to deliver an intuitive and intelligent automotive assistant.”