The Shanghai Auto Show played host to a couple of pretty important announcements this week. For instance, automotive manufacturer Harman has announced a brand new partnership with Baidu under which, the two will collaborate with each other so as to bring some highly advanced AI tech within automaker’s reach. At one end of the partnership is Harman, a Samsung owned automotive supplier with extensive reach, while at the other end is Baidu, an Internet giant considered as one of China’s foremost AI companies.
The duo will attempt to create and market in-car AI powered solutions for automakers. The market is rapidly growing as cars get smarter and as such, the two companies are hoping to leverage the extensive reach brought in by Harman with Baidu’s state of the art technology to create disruptive products.
While nothing to this effect has been officially announced, a good example of just what would be possible for the two companies working together could be taken from Baidu’s DuerOS. As a voice-based personal assistant, Baidu is thinking about integrating DuerOS into cars.
The DuerOS platform is kind of like Alexa except for the fact that it can be integrated with all sorts of consumer electronics and not just speakers. DuerOS is integrate-able with speakers, TVs, phones and so on. The companies could together leverage this into a personalized AI for cars that allowed people to command it in native languages.
That is of course , just one use case scenario. The potential for collaboration is pretty huge. Meanwhile, this is not the first time that the two companies are coming together to work on something. Previously, Harman and Baidu had collaborated to launch a solution called CarLife.
That particular system offered a slew of networked, Internet-based features and could be reached through the networked in-car infotainment systems. We can expect similar systems in the future of course, but we can also expect the companies to come up with further innovation in a bid to make the time spent inside cars, that much more interesting.
