Ford showcased some of its improvements on Sync this week with improved voice recognition and user friendliness. The newest version uses voice-recognition technology from Nuance that can now recognize up to 10,000 voice commands and enables drivers to talk in more complete sentences. The goal is to make nearly every function in the car voice-activated. The voice upgrades will be available on the next generation of SYNC, launching this year on the new 2011 Ford Edge.
The first generation of Sync was introduced on the Focus in 2007, but the company plans to offer its new MyFord Touch interface installed on at least 80% of all of its vehicles by 2015.
The system may understand 10 times as many words as it did before, but it still has trouble understanding female voices, says USA Today.
MyFord Touch boasts an 8-inch LCD touchscreen and replaces traditional knobs with touch sensors. Sync is the software that runs at the heart of the system. It allows your cellphone to be part of the network. Say a simple command and SYNC will use your connected phone to make the call hands-free.
For family members who share the same vehicle, up to 12 phones can easily be paired with the system. Should more than one paired phone be present in the vehicle at the same time, SYNC will attempt to contact the designated primary phone first. SYNC also has the ability to easily switch between phones.
Meanwhile, the ng Connect Program, co-founded by Alcatel-Lucent, today announced the expansion of the initiative to the Asia Pacific region with the launch of a new LTE Connected Car concept at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.
The Connected Car concept vehicle uses an LTE radio and antenna from Alcatel-Lucent, QNX Software for the operating system providing the touchscreen user interfaces and media players for YouTube and Pandora, Content partners from Atlantic Records, The Kids VoD Service from Kabillion, and more than 1,500 chumby applications.
Currently there are more than 69 million vehicles in China, and the company’s vehicle growth rate is almost 7.66 percent year over year. In addition a number of telecom carriers are planning to roll out next-generation 4G/LTE networks in the next year, all setting the stage for the LTE Connected Car concept launched today in China.
