Google And Volkswagen Partner For AI Assistant On Smartphone

JAKARTA Google, part of Alphabet Inc., provides the main capabilities for artificial intelligence assistants (AI) for Volkswagen drivers through smartphone applications. This partnership is part of Google's strategy to expand its business by offering tools to build AI applications for companies.

Through assistants within the Volkswagen app, users can ask questions like "How to replace leaky tires?" or point the phone's camera at the vehicle dashboard to receive relevant information.

This AI assistant uses Google's big language model, Gemini, which can understand and generate predictive responses to human language, and utilize cloud computing capacity. The tool is designed by entering data such as Volkswagen vehicle owners' manuals and YouTube videos about vehicle maintenance into Gemini.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that this product requires solutions for multimodality, namely the ability to process various types of data such as text, images, and videos.

"This problem looks simple at first glance, but technically very complex," Kurian said, quoted by VOI from Reuters. Many people think what we created was a voice translation system to text which then looked for manuals. Not at all.

The AI assistant is available for free for about 120,000 Volkswagen Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport model owners, and will launch early next year for model 2020 cars and above.

The company's generative AI adoption could change the lucrative cloud computing market, where Google is in third place in the market share behind Amazon and Microsoft. While most companies are still looking for practical AI applications for users.

Cloud computing is a growing business segment for Google, accounting for 33 billion US dollars (Rp499.9 trillion) out of the company's total revenue of US$307 billion (Rp4,650.7 trillion) by 2023. AI solutions have boosted billions of dollars in revenue this year, although Google is reluctant to disclose more detailed figures.

Volkswagen declined to provide details on the use of its AI assistants so far.