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Amazon's Alexa heads for the fast lane

Paula Gilbert
By Paula Gilbert, ITWeb telecoms editor.
Johannesburg, 05 Dec 2016
Amazon Web Services says BMW and Hyundai's Genesis have already rolled out some of Alexa's skills in their vehicles.
Amazon Web Services says BMW and Hyundai's Genesis have already rolled out some of Alexa's skills in their vehicles.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is making moves in the connected car space by putting its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistant, Alexa, into vehicles.

"Alexa in the car is something we are working on right now with automotive partners. It's very exciting for us and we are going to continue to do work in this space," CJ Frost, AWS principal solutions architect for Alexa Automotive, told a breakaway session at the AWS re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas.

"The idea istaking the Alexa assistant that you use in your house and bringing her into your car in a seamless experience. It makes the connected car a service endpoint for cloud services; so think of cars as really interesting Internet of things (IOT) endpoints," he explains.

Alexa is the voice service that powers AWS' Echo and Echo Dot devices, and provides capabilities or "skills" that enable users to control IOT-connected devices in their homes using voice. Alexa is powered by AWS' Lex technology which uses automatic speech recognition technology and natural language understanding.

Alexa uses machine learning, so the more customers use Alexa, the more she adapts to speech patterns, vocabulary and personal preferences, and the more skills she learns.

Frost says Alexa's voice service allows access to Alexa to be put it in other devices, including cars.

"These are skills that allow you to ask Alexa to give you information about your vehicle or take action on those IOT endpoints in the vehicle. We have some that are already launched. BMW and Genesis, a division of Hyundai, have already launched and rolled out some skills in their vehicles, and they have been very successful so far; people love these skills."

He says two weeks ago, Hyundai decided to roll out Alexa skills to more Hyundai-branded vehicles.

"What we are going to see going forward is more intelligence inside cars, just like we are going to see more intelligence on every single device and there is going to be more connectivity and more features. It's going to drive a lot of innovation on behalf of the consumer for the type of new functionality you will be able to add inside the car through these sort of intelligent features," Matt Wood, GM of product strategy at AWS, told ITWeb in an interview on the side-lines of the conference.

Wood says the connected cars space is incredibly exciting for AWS because vehicles have evolved to basically become huge connected devices.

"We have customers like BMW that are running all of their software on top of our service, so they have sensors inside the car and those sensors are able to collect all of this data and aggregate that anonymously. This could be traffic conditions or road conditions, and then they update their maps in real-time across all of their fleet to be able to tell people where the traffic is, where the potholes are, where you last parked your car. You can lock your doors or beep your horn from your mobile phone - all of these sorts of things are possible now," says Wood.

How it works

Frost says Alexa can be used outside or inside the car to provide information about the vehicle, like petrol level or whether the car is locked. It also allows the motorist to send route info to the car ahead of a journey so that navigation is set up beforehand.

"If you think of what a skill is, it's the ability for the Alexa cloud to understand how to answer a customised question.

"So if I were to ask Alexa to close the car windows, she would not understand, but because BMW built that custom skill I can now say 'Alexa ask BMW to close the windows of my car' and she understands and directs that request through the BMW cloud and down to my car," he explains.

The user makes the request by saying something to Alexa through an Echo device or another Alexa-enabled device. The audio stream is captured and sent up to the AWS cloud, which acknowledges the user is engaging the BMW skills and the request is passed to the BMW cloud. The request then goes down to the car and is fulfilled. The user then gets a response back, saying the request has been successfully sent to the car.

"In the space of about five seconds through one utterance (the command), I've done something pretty magical - which has replaced me going downstairs, opening my car, turning it on, rolling up the windows, locking it again and going back into my house. That is very powerful," Frost adds.

Once inside the car, Alexa has all of the same capabilities and conveniences that an Echo device enables in a house. For example, requesting a bank balance or ordering a pizza on the way home ? as well as engaging directly with the vehicle to reroute the user to avoid accidents or traffic, or directing the motorist to the closest petrol station.

The future

Frost says the industry estimates that over the next five years, 90% of vehicles will be connected to the Internet, which facilitates a lot of capability for innovation and mobility. Introducing AI into the vehicle opens up so many possibilities, he notes.

"This has the ability to fuel autonomous driving, which opens up a new realm of mobility where my car, a car-share or a rental car can be autonomously driven. We can have far less density on the road, so traffic is lessened and people get to their destinations safer and faster. I can read the newspaper or watch a movie while I'm driven to my location," Frost adds.

"We are very excited about the future of Alexa in automotive and right now we have skills that have been delivered by our automotive partners and we are continuing to work in the automotive space to fuel this idea of mobility. As we go forward, we will apply more and more of these ideas to the bigger picture, especially as we move towards autonomous driving," says Frost.

"I saw an article recently about the top 16 autonomous car-makers you need to keep an eye on and 13 of them run on AWS. So the weight of real-world autonomous driving, real-world deep learning and artificial intelligence is happening today on AWS and we are very excited to bring intelligence as a service and there is a huge amount happening on the platform already," adds Wood.

Besides the partnerships with BMW and Genesis, Frost says AWS is looking at ways to get Alexa into cars that are already on the road.

"Something we are investigating right now is using a mobile device platform to actually run Alexa on the phone and have the audio capture go through the car's microphones, and allow Alexa to come into the car using just the mobile device platform."

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