Google, Volkswagen partner on smartphone AI assistant | usagoldmines.com

Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google is offering key capabilities for a synthetic intelligence assistant for Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) drivers in a smartphone app, a part of Google’s technique to win enterprise by providing instruments to construct enterprise AI functions.

Shoppers can ask Volkswagen’s in-app assistant questions like “How do I alter a flat tire?” or level their cellphone cameras at automobile dashboards to obtain related info.

The AI assistant attracts on Google’s Gemini giant language fashions, applications that may perceive and generate predictive responses to human language, and cloud computing capability.

The VW software was designed by including information equivalent to Volkswagen proprietor’s manuals and YouTube movies on automobile upkeep to Gemini.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian informed Reuters that the product required overcoming technical hurdles to multimodality, the power to course of completely different information sorts equivalent to textual content, pictures and movies.

“The issue appears to be like superficially easy, however it’s technically very complicated,” Kurian mentioned. “Most individuals assume what we constructed is a speech-to-text translation system that then appears to be like up a guide. Completely not.”

The AI assistant is free and obtainable to about 120,000 homeowners of Volkswagen’s Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport fashions. It is going to roll out by early subsequent yr to different vehicles from mannequin yr 2020 and later.

Company adoption of generative AI might alter the profitable cloud computing market, the place Google locations third by way of market share behind Amazon (AMZN.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O). Most corporations are nonetheless trying to find functions that customers will discover sensible.

Cloud computing is a rising enterprise phase for Google, accounting for $33 billion of the agency’s $307 billion in total income in 2023.

AI options have pushed billions in income this yr, the corporate has mentioned, although it declined to reveal extra exact figures.

Volkswagen declined to provide particulars about utilization for its AI assistant to this point.