By Jean-Baptiste Piggin Mar 15, 2007, 14:23 GMT
Hanover, Germany - Car entertainment systems that can be operated by voice commands while the driver keeps both hands on the steering wheel and both eyes on the road are coming next year, industry figures said Thursday at the Cebit trade fair in Germany.
Intel, the world's biggest semi-conductor manufacturer, said its chips, which integrate the various components, were far enough advanced to do this, and demonstrated a prototype that picks out the right song to play after the driver pronounces the title.
Cars are expected to gradually acquire sophisticated computers that handle both satellite navigation and playback of users' private music collections, which will be brought into the car for each trip loaded on an ordinary household MP3 player.
Earlier this month Intel demonstrated a cockpit of a BMW car at the March 8 start of the Geneva Motor Show which runs an internet- based trip-planning service as a navigation aid, for example to find out fuel prices at the nearby filling stations.
The US-based company said it was pushing an open standard that could be used by all chipmakers and car manufacturers. The new functions require a series of devices to work together, with a computer chip as the centrepiece of the car network.
At Cebit, the annual computing fair which began Thursday, Thomas Krippgans, an executive of consumer-electronics company, demonstrated how a prototype and its software can be commanded by voice to play the desired music.
He said a key obstacle was teaching the software to understand accented or mis-prononounced names, for example when a German driver asks for a song with an English name. 'We needed a multilingual approach,' he said.
By next year's Cebit trade show in March, the devices would be available with this feature in an after-market version, to be bought off the shelf and fitted into the dashboards of existing cars.
He said it would take longer to introduce the feature as a factory-built feature in new cars. Initially, voice control would be a 'high-end' feature for the most expensive systems only.
Christian Morales, head of Intel Europe, said Intel had also teamed up with Parrot, a maker of telephone accessories for wireless mobile systems, to use Bluetooth signals to communicate between the devices in the car.
The Parrot 'gateway' would go on sale 'in the course of this year.' It could be used for audio streaming, playing music out of a pocket MP3 player through the car's audio speakers.
Intel executives stressed that the arrival of complex computer systems providing both information and entertainment in the car would not affect the sophisticated semi-conductors that operate a car's engine, steering and brakes.
'Car control has to be completely separate,' said an executive. 'You don't want it to touch in any way with the entertainment technology.'
Your Talkback on this Story