By Pat Marquez, Principal Technical Project Manager
With vacation travel by car on the rise, it’s likely that this year, your family trip will have an important four-wheeled companion. Imagine taking your three-row SUV along the winding roads of the scenic Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). You start at San Francisco, drive southbound along the mountainside roads of Monterey, cross over the bridge at Big Sur, and arrive at your last stop in Los Angeles.
- As beautiful as the PCH drive is, the driver faces a heavy cognitive load:
- Keeping your eyes on the road,
- Glancing at the picture-perfect Pacific sunset,
- Finding your way through the fog, and;
- Carrying on a conversation with your passengers (especially those behind you)
In a large, three-row SUV, that last point can be especially – and unnecessarily – complicated.
With Cerence In-Car Communication, You Will Never Look Back.
Enter Cerence In-Car Communication. It enables you to truly enjoy conversations with your passengers – removing the need to look back or shout.
So how does it work?
Nearly all vehicles today have microphones for hands-free calling and voice recognition. When Cerence In-Car Communication is deployed, those same microphones (usually located in the ceiling panel above the driver and passenger) will take your speech and pass it along to the rear passengers’ speakers.
But it doesn’t stop there! It takes two to have a conversation.
For vehicles equipped with microphones for their rear passengers, the same concept applies, but in reverse. The rear microphones will take your passengers’ speech and relay them to the front speakers – all in the blink of an eye, so there’s no lag in the conversation. Combine the two together and you have your own “tin can telephone” inside your SUV!
No SUV? No Problem! Sedans Can Speak, Too.
Luckily, the benefits of Cerence In-Car Communication are not limited to SUVs or minivans. With luxury sedans (especially electric vehicles) on the rise, automakers are stretching their cars to hold bigger high-voltage batteries for more range. This means that the distance between the driver and the rear passengers is stretched, too.
Let’s use ridesharing as an example. Buckle up and put yourself in the driver’s seat.
For hours, you will have passengers sitting behind you who want to engage in small talk, while finding your way around a busy city. You turn your head to the right to speak to them, while turning your steering wheel to the left for your next turn. Your passengers have to grab your headrest and lean forward just to hear you.
With one-way In-Car Communication, the front microphones can propagate the driver’s speech to the sedan’s rear speakers. For ride-sharing vehicles, this allows drivers to keep their eyes on the road while entertaining their passengers with what the city has to offer. Talk about a five-star experience!
Interested in learning more and seeing Cerence In-Car Communication in action? Get in touch with us.