TomTom creates AI-based conversational assistant for vehicles

Digital mapping specialist TomTom said on Tuesday it has partnered with tech giant Microsoft to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered conversational assistant for vehicles.

The assistant will allow users to "converse naturally with their vehicles" and enable voice interaction with infotainment, location search, and vehicle command systems, the company said.

TomTom, which competes with Google Maps and the world's biggest mapping platform HERE, used various Microsoft services like its Azure OpenAI Service to create the voice assistant.

The Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service allows enterprises to leverage ChatGPT maker OpenAI's large language models (LLM).

The voice assistant can be integrated into other automotive infotainment systems and is also built into TomTom's Digital Cockpit, an open, modular in-vehicle infotainment platform, the Dutch map maker said.

Finance chief Taco Titulaer told Reuters in October that TomTom saw new opportunities in generative AI and was "investing time and money and people" into the Technology.

TomTom had launched an LLM plug-in for ChatGPT in July to allow the chatbot's users to plan trips and explore new places using its maps.

The company began working with Microsoft in 2016, when it first started powering Azure Maps location services.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Exclusive: U.S. Must Move ‘Decisively’ to Avert ‘Extinction-Level’ Threat From AI, Government-Commissioned Report Says

T he U.S. government must move “quickly and decisively” to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) which could, in the worst case, cause an “extinction-level threat to the human species,” says a report com mission ed by the U.S. government published on Monday. “Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security,” the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says. “The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons.” AGI is a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. Such systems do not currently exist, but the leading AI labs are working toward them and many expect AGI to arrive within the next five years or less. The three authors of the report worked on it for more than a year, speaking with more than 200 government employees, e...
Read more

How is snow made? An atmospheric scientist describes the journey of frozen ice crystals from clouds to the ground

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. How is snow made? – Tenley, age 7, Rockford, Michigan The thought of snow can conjure up images of powdery slopes, days out of school or hours of shoveling. For millions of people, it’s an inevitable part of life – but you may rarely stop to think about what made the snow. As a professor of atmospheric and planetary sciences, I’ve studied how ice crystals floating in the sky become the snow that coats the ground. It all starts in the clouds. Clouds form when air near the Earth’s surface rises. This happens when sunlight warms the ground and the air closest to it, just like the Sun can warm your face on a cold winter day. As the slightly warmer air rises, it cools – and the water vapor in that rising air condenses to form liq...
Read more

New 'petabit-scale' optical disc can store as much information as 15,000 DVDs

Scientists have developed a new type of optical disc that can increase information storage capacity to the "petabit" level — 125 terabytes of data, or the combined storage capacity of about 15,000 DVDs.  Optical discs, such as DVDs and Blu-ray discs, are durable and inexpensive. A standard single-layer Blu-ray disc can store 25 gigabytes. By comparison, some USB flash drives can store 1TB, and hard disk drives (HDDs) can hold up to 16TB. But a team of scientists has created a new type of material, called "dye-doped photoresist with aggregation-induced emission luminogens" (AIE-DDPR) with a high areal density (the amount of data that can be stored in a given area) that can offer far denser storage capacity than typical HDDs).  Given the increasing amount of data we generate each day, from instant messages to streaming video, AIE-DDPR optical discs have the potential to revolutionize data storage. Optical discs take up less space than current storage methods, ...
Read more