Bosch launches in-car voice assistant, Casey… no data connection needed
Bosch has revealed its in-car voice assistant, Casey, which understand natural speech and uniquely doesn’t need a data connection to work.
IF YOU’VE BOUGHT AND played with Google Home or fiddled around with Siri on an iPhone then you’ll know how useful these things can be. Unfortunately, for things like Google Home, unless you bolt-on additional accessories there’s not a lot the system can do beyond playing music or telling you the current temperature… to work, all of these voice assistant systems need a data connection. Not Bosch’s in-car voice assistant, Casey.
“When drivers get into a modern car, they can sometimes feel like an airplane pilot – buttons, screens, a confusing menu navigation with a thousand sub-menus. Bosch is putting an end to the button chaos in the cockpit. Instead, we turn the voice assistant into a passenger,” said Dr Dirk Hoheisel, Member of the Board of Management of Robert Bosch GmbH.
Using voice control in your car requires you to use set commands, Bosch says Casey allows drivers to say what they want the way they want to say it. “Say what you want, the way you want to say it – Bosch puts a voice assistant in the car who understands the driver just like another person would,” said Hoheisel.
“The Bosch assistant no longer responds to rigidly worded commands. The voice recognition system understands natural sentence structures and can even handle accents and dialects, and it does so for more than 30 countries in the world. English is not simply English for the talented linguist Casey; she speaks a British, American, New Zealand, or Australian dialect,” Bosch said.
Casey, said Bosch, uses the car’s infotainment system when there’s no data connection, remaining active at all times. And you don’t need to keep the name Casey, you can change the name to anything you like. “Regardless of whether it is called “Casey”, “Michael”, or “Linda”, the Bosch voice recognition system understands and speaks 30 different languages with a total of 53 voices. The driver activates the assistant by calling out “Hey, Casey” or uses the new name given to the assistant. The driver starts every new dialog simply by speaking directly to the assistant without having to wait for a tone before beginning to talk”.
