It can be very impressive for a car’s driver to be able to give it commands using his voice ala Siri, like you can do with certain cars in Malaysia like those from Ford, BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Giving commands using your voice instead of fiddling away with a control knob or a touch screen is certainly safer for the driver as his vision would not be taken away from the road.
But of course, one would have to splurge for one of these cars, and of course it would be hard to retrofit such a system to a last generation car. But soon, you might be able to enjoy voice commands in a car if you have a Clarion head unit with Smart Access, as Clarion and Google have announced an agreement to incorporate Google services such as voice recognition and search into Clarion’s Smart Access automotive cloud service.
At the announcement ceremony in Japan, Japanese publication Responsejp noted that an example voice search query to look for “good ramen restaurants”, yielded pretty usable search results even though the request was ambiguous and did not refer to a specified location. Check out a demo video above by another Japanese publication Car Watch. Very cool!
Other Google services that will be available for use through Clarion Smart Access is Google Places for point of interests, as well as Send-to-Car, which will allow you to plot a route or a destination on your computer using Google Maps prior to your journey, and have the same info ready to be used in your car when you begin your journey.
Send-to-Car is currently available for various car makes that use Google Maps in certain versions of their in-car navigation systems such as Audi, BMW, Infiniti, Kia, MINI, Mercedes-Benz and Toyota. Now it can possibly be available for any car that has a Clarion head unit with Smart Access installed as well.
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When i hear voice control i think russian in 2012.
Voice control is cool until you have to demonstrate to somebody then realize how funny you look
da 2 chicks again :-P
who is the 2 chick ? malaysian or japanese?
Yeay…. a clarion girl with rabbit teeth comes again. Bend more dear, many abangs here want to see…..
There are China-made Android head units for half the price nowadays, and with newer version of Android. Seems just as robust. If Clarion still running Android 2.3 as was reported, that’s very outdated.
Japan location match Japanese accent and speak
In Malaysia with Bahasa pasar….you find this function useless
Actually google voice search got BM also no problem
http://paultan.org/2011/03/30/google-voice-search-available-in-bahasa-malaysia/