posted
I'm sure you've all seen the commercials for Ford's new Sync system. You push a button on the steering wheel and give voice commands like "Play Artist so and so" or "Call so and so," and through connections to your media playing device or phone, it recognizes your voice and acts accordingly.
It works excellently. My mom just got a new car with Sync in it, and it was both easy to sync devices into the system and easy to actually navigate. It took me all of three minutes to sync my mom's RAZR into the car and then download her phone book, at which point I think she called everyone in the family. The microphone in the car works well, as people we called said they heard us loud and clear, and the speakers in the car played them to us just as well. I didn't feel like getting my Sansa out, so I just threw some songs onto a jump drive and jacked it into the USB port in the car, at which point the car recognized the device and we easily navigated through the music on the drive. My mom is probably slightly below average when it comes to tech savvyness. She figured it out fairly quickly once prompted, and the car spoke to her often to prompt a response from her.
The system isn't 100% flawless. When searching for Michael Buble, the car announced him as "Michael Bubble." I guess if you pronounce everyone phonetically it'd be fine, but it still found and played him despite the difference.
Has anyone else used the system? I'd love to have it in my next car. I have an older Focus, my mom has a new one, and my dad is actually getting one next week, but not with the Sync. I highly recommend this thing thus far though. It's very user friendly, I think makes driving a lot safer when it comes to making calls (it even audibly reads text messages to you), and makes driving with an MP3 playing device or something similar much safer as well, as you won't have to thumb through it to find different artists or to change radio stations to get the FM transmitter to line up. It's very cool.
I'd also add that technically we're not even getting the most out of it that we could. The bigger cars like the Taurus have in dash LCD screens, and you can use the voice recognition technology to ask it to say, find a gas station and tell you the price of the gas there, or to find you a pizza place and then connect you to it via the phone, then give you directions to get there. That'd be cool, but we haven't tried that feature yet. New features are supposed to be created and available free of charge to all users in the future.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
I'm sure they won't be far behind with the Sony Link or some similarly labeled thing. Or maybe they'll go with Apple, but I doubt it, they'll choose a Japanese company, though I wonder where they'll get the voice recognition technology, as I imagine Ford has to have exclusive rights to what they are using. I'm sure they'll come out with a similar system in a couple years.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Yeah, that would be cool. Our Prius does have voice recognition, but it's very limited. You can dial by number and do a few things with the navigation system, but that's about it.
Posts: 1945 | Registered: Jul 2005
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I'm pretty sure that Sync is a Microsoft product, so I would imagine it will spread to other auto manufacturers quickly.
Posts: 5879 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:Originally posted by ludosti: I'm pretty sure that Sync is a Microsoft product, so I would imagine it will spread to other auto manufacturers quickly.
The actual system is not purely a Microsoft product. The voice recognition technology is from a company called Nuance Communication. Much of the operating system and what not is done via Microsoft Movile for Automobiles. So, while you're probably likely to see something similar in other automakers' cars in the near future, unless they independently develop an identical product with both those companies (assuming there isn't a patent/copyright issue). I'm not sure if Ford has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft or not on the system as a whole, but you won't see the actual thing fully reproduced in another maker's cars, they'll have their own version. Ford still has some rights in the matter as it was developed partially by Ford and partially in concert with Microsoft.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Of course, there's nothing to say that Ford itself might not license out the technology to other automakers, if they decided the price was right.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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Certainly. I'd imagine they won't do it super quick. But I don't see why, if there was interest, they wouldn't eventually make the offer, but I'd be surprised if other auto companies weren't putting R&D dollars into their own programs.
Potentially it could be a boon to them. From what I've read, the system itself is actually very, VERY cheap for Ford. The system itself is marked up like 100 times the component price, but it's still not outrageously priced, it's not bad really, and even comes standard on better models of some cars. Licensing it out at an even higher markup would be a big money maker, but I think that's precisely why any other company would rather develop their own similar system, given the profit margin.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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