Rudy

A few years ago, after BMW added the voice dialing/recognition for the phone (where it reads the phone's contacts without the need to teach the car any voice tags), I speculated that they could utilize the same technology to give us voice entry for navigation destinations. (click here to see where I first mentioned it)

As most of you know, my wish came true and we now have voice enty for nav destinations.

My new wish would be to extend the voice features to the iPod/USB interface -- can it be that hard?

Heck, the Ford Focus has it right now:


Come on BMW, please add this feature!

JSpira

I drove a Ford, Lincoln actually, with SYNC. It was very cool as a voice interface.

BMW is unlikely to adopt it because they aren't behind the design - the NIH syndrome.

But I did put the right people at BMW and MSFT in touch with each other to discuss a few months back.

No word yet on whether there are any continuing discussions.

Rudy

I understand what you're saying (and we discussed this briefly before here but I don't think that the NIH syndrome would apply in this instance. BMW added nav entry by voice well after other manufacturers had it on their cars so why not add this feature too? I'm not talking about specifically adding or licensing SYNC, I'm talking about extending whatever technology they're already using to provide the ability to lookup names in the phonebook or addresses in the nav database. This voice activated lookup technology is likely to be commonplace in the near future so they're certainly not going to be left behind just because they didn't invent it.

I find it hard to believe that the speech-to-text technology that they've already adopted can't be extended and utilized for the audio files so it's not like they're going to have to work out some new deal with MSFT or anything for this incremental feature addition, right?

JSpira

The SYNC capabilities you describe go WAY beyond the capability of the CCC at this point. I understand what you mean in terms of an extension but if you were to spend 15 min. in a SYNC-equipped car, you would see how it is very different and not an extension. The system has more intelligence built into it but it's much newer in overall design.

On the other hand, with SYNC-equipped cars, you can't scroll through the iPod with a nice iDrive controller and see on your Bordmonitor what's in the directory.

Rudy

Okay but I'm not asking BMW to give me SYNC, I'm just asking them to add the capability of voice activation of the music information that's already been loaded into the car's cache -- just like they did for the phone and for the nav.

It's not about SYNC, it's about extending a feature that's already there...

JSpira

Ja, I understand.

If BMW were to use the current system, I would guess it would be very very slow in terms of speech to text because iPods have thousands of tracks. The SYNC system is lightning fast even with thousands of tracks (I used my iPod on it).

As we know, the CCC platform is not that extensible. In order to speed things up, BMW had to remove haptic feedback.

I would like the same as you - I just don?t think it is that easy to implement.