John G. Mabanglo/European Pressphoto AgencyApple announced that it will partner with automakers to make use of Siri.Apple announced an expansion of Siri at the opening of its developers’ conference on Monday; new devices and apps will work with the voice-command service. One of the more intriguing areas of that expansion was the addition of automakers to Siri’s roster of partners. Apple announced that Audi, BMW, Chrysler, GM, Honda, Land Rover/Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz and Toyota would all have “Eyes Free” buttons in their cockpits starting in the next 12 months or so.
It’s a fairly impressive list of automakers. Taken all together, they have sold 58.4 percent of all the cars in the United States so far this year.
I wrote about the state of in-car electronics systems in The New York Times on Sunday , but adding Siri to the mix may accelerate two promising trends: the increasing outsourcing of nonessential car functions to the cloud and the demise of visually distracting displays.
If you think about a modern high-end telematics system, it breaks down into a few major features: navigation, audio, climate, telephone and a grab bag of gee-whiz features I’ll loosely describe as “Internet” (Zagat ratings, apps integration, etc).
Almost all of these can be better handled by Siri and an iPhone. O.K., climate’s better off staying in the car but, then, it always was meant to be. You don’t spend a lot of time adjusting the temperature or the fan, and when you do, you likely want to twist a knob and be done with it.
But let’s work through the other functions: Telephone? That’s on your phone. Audio? Also on your phone. Navigation? With the forthcoming turn-by-turn maps in iOS 6.0, it too will be on the iPhone. (Turn-by-turn is already an amazing feature on Android phones.) The Internet? Your phone.
For this to work well, a Siri-based system is going to have to rely on a reliable data connection to a well-stocked server farm. Those two things are not givens, so we’ll have to wait and see how well this all works in real life.
But if it does, it could have some nice knock-on effects in automobiles. For starters, there’s the matter of cost. Some of the functions a car offers in its options list are ridiculously priced. Adding a factory navigation system to a BMW 128i, the carmaker’s least expensive model, adds 7 percent, or $2,150, to the car’s $31,200 base price. Forget the fact that you can buy a basic GPS unit for $120—Siri could effectively reduce the price to zero.
Now, will automakers rush to cut the prices of their cars accordingly? Don’t hold your breath, but outsourcing features to the phone could mean that even budget models might start to have some of the same capabilities that have been found in luxury cars.
The other benefit is technological. Let’s agree that the current state of in-car tech is not awesome. There are competing schools of thought of how to bring more technology to the driver, each employing some sort of interface that is less than intuitive (“See, you spin this knob here, which moves you through these selections up here. Then you press down on the knob to select something, but don’t forget about the other menus under this button…”) or downright distracting (“This touch screen is so hi-res, you won’t want to take your eyes off it!”)
Voice has always held the promise of a new day when it came to controlling your car’s functions, but most voice-control systems are risible at best. Siri’s had its hiccups through its development, but I’m going to be an optimist and say that the service — and the networks that connect us to it — are going to get better, not worse. If that comes to pass, then we may have a smart, reliable voice-based system that keeps our hands on the wheel and our eyes on the road, which is far better than the solutions the auto industry has so far come up with.
Another point: voice commands may not be visually distracting, but they may be cognitively distracting. We may be entering an age where we can send text messages by voice and hear Facebook posts read aloud to us — and that’s clearly better than trying to do that on a smartphone, with one hand while the other is on the wheel — but maybe these activities are better left outside the car altogether?