Dragon Drive is the best car voice activation system we’ve spoken to

Brian Radloff from Nuance gives us a demo of Dragon Drive, the voice activation system in the new BMW 7 Series. Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn

LAS VEGAS—Distracted driving is a real problem. Even though most of us intrinsically know that playing with our phones isn’t compatible with piloting a vehicle surrounded by other vehicles and pedestrians, it’s a common enough problem that more than a quarter of all crashes involve cell phone use. Not using a phone at all in the car is obviously the ideal solution, but like teenagers and sex, hoping for abstinence is a high-minded but ultimately ineffective approach. If people are going to text and drive—which they are—then systems that make that a safer activity are probably a good thing. At CES last week, Nuance (the company behind Dragon Dictation) gave us a demo of its solution to the problem.

Called Dragon Drive, it’s installed in BMW’s flagship 7 Series sedan, a car packed to the gunwales with technology. And as Nuance’s Brian Radloff demonstrated, it’s remarkably good. In fact, it might be the best voice-activation system we’ve encountered in an automotive setting, Siri included.

Previous experience tells us that not all voice-activated infotainment systems are equal, and even the better ones we’ve used suffer from the problem of needing to wait for the system to finish speaking before issuing it commands. That may be helpful the first few times you use it, but having to wait while a disembodied voice reads out a menu prompt you’ve heard a thousand times before gets pretty frustrating. Dragon Voice solves this problem by letting drivers interrupt or speak over it, preempting the prompts and getting what they need quickly and naturally.

It does this with a combination of on-board and off-board processing, leveraging the knowledge Nuance has built up around natural-language processing and voice recognition. The result is a system that lets the user speak to it conversationally, without the formal and rigid reply structure that pretty much every other system requires. As you can see in the video above, Dragon Drive is able to interpret simple commands like “Call Stephanie” even when your address book contains more than one person with that name. It’s also rather clever when it comes to points of interest or navigation commands that would baffle most other cars (“Take me to I-15,” for example).

It’s not just for calling people or dictating text messages, either. You can access many of the car’s settings with voice commands—asking questions like “what’s my tire pressure” will call up that data on the infotainment screen, and in our testing it was surprisingly good at finding the right answer or pulling up the relevant page from the car’s user manual. It’s even able to cope with a variety of regional accents and dialects, including Spanish pronunciation. It had no problems with my rapid British English speech, something that Siri still struggles with to this day.

Although Dragon Drive is currently only shipping with BMW’s 7 Series, we expect it won’t be too long before it moves into the marque’s other models and is adopted by other OEMs, too. As it’s the first voice-activation system we don’t feel frustrated using, that’s a good thing.