AI Takes Front Seat as ChatGPT Put in Volkswagen Cars
Say goodbye to boring road trips, as Volkswagen has changed the face of driving by implementing ChatGPT into its cars.
Now available in all new vehicles in the all-electric ID family, as well as in the new Golf, new Tiguan and new Passat, the AI chatbot will augment and can be accessed by the IDA voice assistant, and all without pressing a button.
“By seamlessly integrating ChatGPT into the backend of our voice assistant, we are now offering drivers the opportunity to use this AI on a daily basis, thus underlining how innovative our products are,” said Kai Grünitz, Member of the Board of Management Volkswagen Brand for Technical Development, following the announcement.
IDA itself is AI-powered, and can answer general questions, operate vehicle functions like climate control, and plan EV charging along the route to your destination in English, Spanish, Czech and German.
Yet this integration offers a range of new options that go beyond what the voice control previously available.
AI augmentation
This AI addition can provide information on tourist attractions, report on football tournaments or help solve maths problems, all by the driver simply talking to the assistant.
With ChatGPT, however, there is a cut-off date, so such fetches will include past information. ChatGPT will also play second fiddle to IDA, only kicking in if a query cannot be answered by the Volkswagen system.
As EVs and autonomous cars usher in a new level of technology in the cockpit, this implementation is part of a cross industry partnerships drive to get AI industry-leaders into their home-grown products in upskilling efforts.
Currently, AI is mostly used in the auto industry in behind the scenes operations, like in Tesla’s Autopilot, utilising machine vision.
First announced at the CES conference in January of this year, Kai said of the move: “As a result, we are now the first volume manufacturer to make this innovative technology a standard feature in vehicles from the compact segment upwards.”
Addressing AI privacy
It’s important to note, however, that all interactions with ChatGPT are processed anonymously, and data is deleted immediately to protect user privacy.
Equally, at no point does ChatGPT gain access to vehicle data, and the online voice assistant can be deactivated either in the settings area of the Volkswagen app or in the infotainment system’s privacy settings.
Users do not even have to create a new account, install a new app or activate ChatGPT, as this will be layered onto their existing IDA login.
This is possible as the implementation is going through a partner and not OpenAI itself.
Collaborating with Cerence, a automotive AI solutions company, Volkswagen is able to utilise its Cerence Chat Pro, which uses a variety of sources – including ChatGPT – to enable IDA to provide accurate and relevant responses to nearly every query imaginable.
OpenAI has itself taken steps to address data concerns surrounding information being used to train its models, releasing enterprise versions of its GPT.
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