Cerence Brings Industry-Leading Voice Technologies Outside the Car with Cerence Exterior Vehicle Communication

New Cerence offering creates new use cases and will be critical for the autonomous car user experience

Cerence Inc., AI for a world in motion, today introduced Cerence Exterior Vehicle Communication, a new suite of AI and voice-powered innovations that enables drivers to interact with their cars from the outside. The new offering is extraordinarily useful for today’s car owners and will be critical for the autonomous, shared vehicles of the future.

Cerence Exterior Vehicle Communication brings together the company’s industry-leading technologies – speech recognition, natural language understanding, text-to-speech, speech signal enhancement, and voice biometrics – with the growing number of exterior microphones on today’s cars to enable a new set of use cases. For example:

• With exterior speech recognition, as a driver approaches their car at night, unable to find the door handle, they can say, “Hey Cerence, turn on the light.”

• Parents taking their kids’ sports gear out of the car can ask, “Hey Cerence, close the trunk.”

• The same parents, when walking away from the car with bags in hand, may instruct their car, “Hey Cerence, park in this spot.”

• When exterior speakers are present, drivers can communicate with people outside the car, for example at toll booths or drive-throughs, while keeping windows closed and remaining undisturbed in the safe and comfortable space of the car.

To maintain safety and security, Cerence Exterior Vehicle Communication leverages biometric innovations to limit certain capabilities to only approved people. For example, when the system is activated by a person outside the vehicle, the car first checks whether the user’s key or phone is in the vicinity. For security-relevant functions such as unlocking the car or commanding it to perform autonomous driving tasks like parking, Cerence Voice Biometrics can verify the speaker’s identity and provide an additional level of protection and security.

“Throughout our long history and from the early days of speech recognition, we’ve led the industry with voice-powered technologies that have transformed the in-car experience,” said Christophe Couvreur, SVP & GM, Core Products, Cerence. “Cerence Exterior Vehicle Communication is perfectly suited for the car of today and tomorrow. With ever-increasing levels of autonomy transforming the very definition of driving, now is the time to leverage our expertise to create an entirely new way for people to communicate with cars, both now and in the car of tomorrow.”

In the future, Cerence Exterior Vehicle Communication will play a critical role in increasingly autonomous and shared vehicles. Imagine a bustling city center where shared, driverless vehicles abound. In the absence of a human driver, Cerence Exterior Vehicle Communication will enable users to ask a vehicle for essential information like its planned route, anticipated delays, and more. The ability to communicate directly with the vehicle – before stepping inside – will help build trust in autonomous vehicles and increase adoption as users embrace a new mobility ecosystem. For shared vehicles, validating the driver’s identity with Cerence Voice Biometrics enables user preferences like radio stations, navigation favorites, and seat position, thus creating a personalized experience without the user having to configure the new environment every time.

Source: Cerence media announcement