Siri will be integrated in GM vehicles
The development process has taken more than a year, but the people over at Chevrolet have finally become the first of nine manufacturers to integrate Siri – Apple’s personal voice assistant – into their MyLink infotainment system. The Spark and the Sonic LTZ and RS will gain this new feature next year.
Ever since Siri was launched in 2011, it has become rather obvious to the automotive industry what they could do with this new feature. They realized that they didn’t have to rely on a vehicle’s media system for certain features which could be outsourced to the driver’s smartphone.
Quite a few carmakers have committed to this approach and Chevrolet are the first to include an ‘Eyes Free’ button into the vehicle’s steering wheel to ‘summon’ Siri to listen to the driver’s commands. These commands can be pretty much anything from sending a message, checking your calendar dates, to changing and playing songs, basically many things that you’d be doing manually and hence which would require to take one hand off the steering wheel, you’ll be able to do by voice command.
It must be mentioned that this feature already exists pretty much on all cars that can sync with Siri via Bluetooth, but it does require that you actually touch your phone; the difference with the Eyes Free button being that you won’t have to actually physically touch the phone nor will its screen light up – hence limiting distraction.
There is a problem that the Bluetooth connection integration faces however, and that is in the amount of white noise that tends to interfere quite a bit with voice commands. The white noise is caused by road noise, which made recognizing commands difficult.
We can only hope that Chevrolet engineers have managed to integrate a feature which will allow Siri to differentiate between a human voice and road noise, as it does when using the iPhone’s three microphones.
