Ask Your Car Radio!
March 6th, 2006 | Published in Business, Entertainment, News, Sports, Technology, Travel, Weather
Web Wire
In the future, drivers will be able to conveniently retrieve information from the Internet using “natural language.” This has been made possible by a new technology that automatically generates voice applications from Internet information and transmits it to the vehicle via radio signals.
It’s just not your day. You drive by several low-priced gas stations and then, just when you’re on the point of running out of gas, you wind up at a pump where a liter costs five cents more. “Just my luck,” you say to yourself as you reach for the nozzle. But it could all be different in the future. Tomorrow’s drivers will ask their car radio for the locations of the cheapest gas stations along their route. What currently sounds like a fairy tale could one day become a reality. “SmartWeb Vehicle” is the new mobile information system that interacts with drivers in natural language.
While you drive, the system searches the Internet for any potentially useful information. If you want to know which gas station in Dortmund has the lowest gas prices or how many goals Schalke 04 has scored, you can use SmartWeb Vehicle to retrieve this information from the system by means of voice input. Although it sounds simple, it involves a number of sophisticated technologies that have to be combined into one operational whole. The new system is being developed by experts from the Siemens Corporate Technology Division (CT) in Munich and engineers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Device Architecture and Software Technology (FIRST) in Berlin. The vehicle prototype from the SmartWeb project will be on display for the first time at the CeBIT computer trade show March 9-15 in Hanover. The exhibit can be found in Hall 9 at the BMBF’s Human – Technology – Interaction booth A44. Sponsored by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the SmartWeb project involves fifteen partners from industry and research cooperating on a utilization of the semantic web under the direction of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).
