Many new cars use large touchscreen infotainment displays that take over many of the car’s control functions. For many drivers, this trend makes them miss the good old buttons. However, the nostalgia of drivers is not shared by Wasim Bensaid, Head of Software Development at Rivian. He believes that the use of buttons in a car is a «anomaly». This was reported by ITC.UA with reference to Techcrunch.
«This is a bug. It’s not a feature,” Bensaid said at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. — Ideally, you would like to communicate with your car using your voice. The problem today is that most voice assistants are simply hacked».
Bensaid added that «every week» he drives an engineering car that has an AI-based voice assistant, although he did not specify which one. Earlier, he mentioned in an interview that Rivian has a «partnership that I can’t talk about» yet.
«I think the car is actually a fantastic environment for artificial intelligence,» he said, noting that latency and hallucinations are still very serious problems that need to be addressed.
Wasim Bensaid believes that a modern vehicle is so rich in features that it is difficult to implement an interface to control all of them. At the same time, he has great faith in the ability of AI-based voice control to handle complex requests. For example, he said that if the driver says «I’m hungry», the assistant in the car should be able to quickly direct him to the nearest restaurant that the user might prefer.
Bensaid said that Rivian’s goal is to make it possible to move all controls from the touchscreen to voice control.
Until that happens, Bensaid said he remains focused on delivering a customized experience for Rivian owners — hence CarPlay is not coming anytime soon. Although he noted that the Rivian «team is still discussing it», he considers the use of CarPlay «lazy» and prefers to integrate individual apps such as Apple Music.
CarPlay «takes over all the pixels on the screen, completely replacing the entire experience, and we truly believe that with the technology capabilities we have, we can offer a much more sophisticated, integrated experience,” he said.