BMW is investing heavily in cars of the future. The German car maker has decided to be one of the participants in the race to autonomous vehicles and is now collaborating with IBM to bring add a few more enhancements to its future cars.
Just in case you need a little something to jog your memory, Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system that is capable some really serious calculative feats. Among other things, the supercomputer can also answer questions posed in natural language.
Meanwhile, BMW has partnered with IBM in order to focus on the data side of the autonomous car building equation.
IBM will be working with BMW in order to boost the latter’s Research and Development. Some of Watson’s technologies will be included into BMW cars for developing interfaces that will help drivers interact with these vehicles and actually have a “conversation” with them in their own language.
According to a joint press release released by the new partners, a group of researchers will be working on four BMW i8 hybrid sports cars located at IBM’s Munich IoT headquarter to develop “intelligent assistant functions.
This new technology will allow the drivers can ask questions about the vehicle in natural language. Using machine learning, the car will become familiar with the driver’s habits and provide suggestions in the same language on how to save fuel, how to adopt a safer driving style, update about route, traffic and weather conditions.
According to IBM’s global head of the Watson IoT business,
While the car will remain a fixture in personal transportation, the driving experience will change more over the next decade than at any other time of the automobile’s existence.
This partnership and technology has nothing to do with autonomous cars at present. It only focuses on making sense of the vast amounts of data being produced by connected cars.
Earlier this month, Audi too announced a similar technology that will come up in its selected models in 2017. The BMW rival is coming up with a new vehicle-to-infrastructure platform that will enable its cars to communicate with everything from parking lots to tollbooths to help the driver make better decisions while on the road. The system will signal the car about the light turning red, allowing the vehicle to let off the throttle if it knows it won’t make the light, which will in turn also help save fuel.
It was in the month of September that luxury automobile makers BMW, Audi and Mercedes announced the launch of a project where they declared to work on technology that will help vehicles communicate with each other and help the driver gain a better understanding of traffic conditions. In IBM’s Watson, BMW has enlisted a formidable ally to its side.
