According to the announcement, Mercedes is augmenting its existing MBUX Voice Assistant with ChatGPT via the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. This means that beyond taking orders to run certain tasks, your car can now have conversations with you, somewhat. Naturally, all this is done via voice input; wouldn’t want people taking their hands of the wheel or eyes off the road to type in a question for the AI. On the surface, it sounds like the expansion of an otherwise pretty simplistic virtual assistant, albeit of the Mercedes flavour rather than Google or Apple’s Siri. And that would be nice if it really works out that way, but more likely this would be something you make use of to pass the time while being stuck in traffic. After all, if you’ve been keeping up with developments in the scene, you know that when ask it “to answer a complex question”, there’s a risk of getting completely made up information rather than a comprehensive answer. Or even getting outright bizarre responses from prompts that you’d think were not too out of the ordinary. At any rate, Mercedes says that it is trialing the addition of ChatGPT to its virtual assistant starting today in the US, with the trial expected to last three months. The company says that it will use the findings of this test to consider “the rollout strategy for large language models in more markets and languages”. (Source: Mercedes)
