Exclusive: Volvo tells us why having Gemini in your next car is a good thing

In-car personal assistants are about to get useful, it looks like.

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[arikol]

Could you do a bit of a critical piece on this kind of stuff. The information presented is interesting, but actually going through whether this AI inclusion is reasonable and provides benefits to a normal user, who is the normal user, is this a risk for distraction, and so forth. What does current research on usability/UX and or distractions suggest?

 

[arikol]

So, there is one use case where a competent voice AI system would be nice.

And that is, when I am driving, and no one else is in the car, I would like to be able to ask the assistant to add a specific intermediate destination to the navigation plan.

Specific. As in, exactly what I asked for, and if there is not one in reasonable diversion distance, information to that affect. As in, if I ask for a credit union, do not send me to a bank. If I ask for a Wendy's®, do not send me to a Burger King® just because BK paid for placement this week. And if I ask for a Japanese restaurant, I do not want Thai food. And if there is no Japanese restaurant, just tell me there isn't. Don't make one up. And don't send me 60 miles out of the way, either.

And I do not want this to preempt my ultimate destination. I just need twenty bucks, a Frosty®, and some ramen. I have not bailed on wanting to see my niece this weekend.

This is such low-hanging fruit, and yet nobody has come up with a passable implementation so far.

Nobody wants to spontaneously buy a TV. Everyone spontaneously gets a craving for an ultraprocessed ice-milk beverage food product.

I think this raises at least a couple of important points.
The car company representative came up with a very silly example scenario that should really never come up ("hmm... I am out driving but would like to suddenly and on a whim go and buy a 75" Samsung TV of the type XXX-75YYY... let me as the AI assistant"), yet they cannot look at how actual humans behave or what functionality would support that normal behaviour.
Even today, if we are navigating to somewhere and decide that we are hungry or need petrol then the bloody nav starts recalculating the route and directing us in silly ways. And adding a navpoint while driving is seriously hit-and-miss, and may, as the previous poster points out, send us somewhere else entirely.

In car navigation is fine so long as we can plan the route in advance, but rubbish when adding in stops while under way. The same goes for both Google maps and Apple maps. An AI assistant needs to focus on tasks that would actually help, not on misjudging whether a big TV would fit in the car (taking the dimensions of the TV without the packaging would be the first fun screwup).