This & That

This & That

Voice recognition reaches new level

A new voice-activated multimedia control system will be standard equipment on a dozen Ford automobiles starting this fall. Ford SYNC, developed in collaboration with Microsoft, is a fully integrated and updatable media system that allows automobile occupants to operate both Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones and nearly all portable media players with simple voice commands or hand controls on the steering wheel.

The system uses Freescale’s i.MX31 processor, which runs the operating system and applications, and handles audio signal processing and voice recognition. The chip is based on an ARM11 core and uses high-speed USB for data transfer.

Using SYNC, your cell phone address book is automatically loaded into the system. Then you can say “Phone (name)” and the call is made with call progress displayed on the large dash LCD. If you have a phone message, it will be shown on the display and if you say “Read Message” and the system will read it to you. It even recognizes and reads text messages. I expect there is even a choice of voices.

Connect your Ipod or similar device to the dash board and say “Play” and you have music—with a description of the current tune shown on the dash LCD. You can say “Play” (track, artist, album, genre or playlist + name of the track, artist, or album)” to select items from the player.

It understands English, French, and Spanish languages and needs no “training” to recognize voices. Being fully updatable is a key element, as new phone and music player technologies will be coming along during the life of the car.