Voice-activated digital assistants take to the car

This feature was brought to you by Nuance software. Not in any commercial sense, like the sponsorship clips at the beginning of soap operas, but very literally. After a mild stroke four years ago, I lost the ability to type with my left hand, and so I use Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking system to dictate all my writing. The same disability has forced me to give up driving, as I can no longer reliably change gear or operate indicators in a timely fashion. So when Nuance invited me to see the voice-activated system it was developing for the automotive sector, my interest was piqued.

Voice-activated digital assistants are becoming familiar to many of us, with the technology arguably developed and certainly popularised by Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri and the Amazon Alexa system. They are becoming increasingly common around the home, where they can be used for everything from controlling audiovisual systems (“Hey Alexa, play such-and-such a track by so-and-so” is, I suspect, a common refrain) to compiling shopping lists and accessing online information. Despite their possible security risks, digital assistants seem to be infiltrating so many homes that they may inevitably become as much a part of life as domestic staff once were.