When it comes to in-vehicle intelligent systems, friends in the car circle will probably think of Zebra and Android at the first time, and the more hardcore ones will name BlackBerry's QNX, Tencent's Changan's Sycamore Vehicle Connection, Baidu's DuerOS, and even Geely Yigatong's GKUI. but there's such a company, whose name isn't well known to the public, and not everyone in the automotive industry is familiar with it, even if they are. But it is such a company that more than half of the cars produced globally in 2019 are equipped with its family's technology, and its name is Cerence.
What is Cerence all about?
Maybe the name Cerence is not familiar to the average consumer, but the name Nuance is certainly not unfamiliar to professionals.Nuance Corporation (Nuance?Communications,?Inc.?NASDAQ:?NUAN)? Nuance is the world's largest company specializing in the development and sale of speech recognition software, image processing software and input method software. The famous computer speech recognition software NaturallySpeaking is from Nuance.
If you still don't have the concept, let's take another easy-to-understand example: you must know that the iPhone 4S brings a revolutionary human-computer interaction product - "Siri". In fact, it was Nuance that provided the voice database support for Siri (Apple used the Vlingo platform for a while, but it was later acquired by Nuance).
As a globally based provider of speech and language solutions, Nuance is perhaps even more famous for its other product, the T9 input method. At one point, more than 90 percent of the world's cell phones used T9, which was originally developed by a company called Tegic Communications and later purchased by Nuance. The biggest advantage of this input method is that it supports more than 70 languages and is built into more than 3 billion mobile devices. It has become an industry-recognized standard input method and is built into many OEMs, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, Sharp, Haier, Huawei, and more.
The automotive business, one of Nuance's core businesses in 2B, started 20 years ago. As of today, companies including Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Ford, General Motors, SAIC, Geely and others are still its customers, while some 300 million cars worldwide are already equipped with the company's technology.
In order to specialize its automotive business, in 2019, Nuance announced that it would split its automotive business segment into a publicly traded company, Cerence, a newly coined name that combines intelligence, experience, serenity, and control. and control. And less than three months after the split, Cerence delivered its first answer at CES 2020.
Smart software developers who don't understand cutting-edge hardware aren't good at voice recognition
Tracing back to the iPhone's beginnings, its eventual success didn't stem from hardware innovation. After all, in the early days of Palm or Microsoft's handheld computers, also equipped with a large touch screen, camera, equipped with intelligent systems, but these did not allow them to survive to the present day. What really made the iPhone famous and popular was the success of OTA and the emergence of the appstore. Hardware lays the foundation, software gives the soul; this means that whoever can give full play to the performance of software and hardware can lead to real innovation and change.
As a veteran in the field of speech recognition, Nuance once dominated the field, but with the rise of big data technology, Apple, Google and other giants to participate in the war and poaching, so that the segmentation of the dominant Nuance had a moment of disillusionment. However, it is precisely this kind of competition that prompted Nuance to stand at a higher cause, to re-examine the voice recognition business and its future. The purpose of speech recognition is to make human-machine interaction simpler and more direct. If voice recognition technology is the entry point, with big data parsing and artificial intelligence algorithms, supplemented by intelligent hardware such as HUD, cameras, holographic projection, etc., to create a set of overall interaction solutions integrating visual, auditory, and gesture, it may be more competitive! Because the driver's energy will be liberated from driving in L3 level and above self-driving cars, a future-oriented intelligent interaction solution is the key to victory.
At CES?2020?, ?Cerence? unveiled its solution for automakers -- Cerence?Drive? upgraded version. It's more like a super-smart Jarvis (Iron Man's intelligent voice assistant), capable of regular functions such as vehicle control and navigation settings, as well as obtaining introductions to points of interest outside the car and corresponding service functions by gazing at a target outside the window. For example, the camera will observe the driver's eyes, according to the direction of his gaze, and the vehicle is located in the positioning information for comparison, in order to determine what the building or landscape he is gazing at in the end, and according to this coordinate to provide the corresponding services; such as restaurant table reservations, movie tickets to buy, or the introduction of the landscape. At the same time, the driver can also use hand gestures to move and select parts displayed on the windshield like Tom Cruise did in the movie "Mission Impossible 4", to navigate, play music, check the weather and other operations. The driver can also move the navigation window widget to the windshield in front of the passenger by grabbing, throwing and gazing at it, so that the passenger can take on the role of "co-pilot". The driver can also use tapping gestures to pause and resume music, or play the next track.
Cerence's demonstration of interaction is not limited to the inside of the vehicle, as it has joined forces with e.GO?MOOVE?GmbH, e.GO?Digital?GmbH, and Saint-Gobain?Sekurit to create an e.GO?Mover?self-driving electric bus that showcases innovative human-computer interactions outside the vehicle. Combining multilingual automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding and response, speech synthesis, speech signal enhancement and?Saint-Gobain?Sekurit transparent screen technology, people outside the vehicle can use the glass as a display to interact with the vehicle, a technology that provides new ideas for consumers to communicate with self-driving vehicles more safely and efficiently.
A closer look at the technology in these two programs contains line-of-sight tracking, gesture recognition, sound source localization, voiceprint localization, and windshield display, side window projection, etc., and the hardware applied to it contains hardware such as in-vehicle cameras, in-vehicle glass projection, and in-vehicle touch screens. If we compare with the domestic enterprises mentioned in the previous article, I think that no matter which party has made great efforts at the software level, but at the level of combining software and hardware, perhaps the CES exhibits brought by Cerence have a more enlightening effect. And only the combination of software and hardware to do real do thorough, is the key to the future can produce a revolution.
Bold layout for China
Cerence has made extensive adjustments to its organizational structure since becoming independent. According to Liu Feng, senior product director of Cerence?Greater China, Cerence?business is now divided into Core?Automotive?BU, Growth?and?Advance?Technology?BU, and Professional?Services?BU. Professional Services BU?) There are three major sections. Among them, the growth business and the frontier technology business are under the responsibility of the Greater China Region, with headquarters in Shanghai and branches in Chengdu and Beijing. At the China headquarters, we can see a lot of technicians who have served in traditional OEMs such as SAIC and Dongfeng, and who have a deep understanding of China's automotive industry. Therefore, the China headquarters has complete product, R&D, engineering, sales and service capabilities in the country with a high degree of autonomy, which greatly improves the complex administrative and business processes under the former 鈥檛uance鈥檚 system, and enables the China team to have a higher execution efficiency and innovation vitality.
With this institutional advantage, Cerence has grown rapidly in China. For example, at this year's ?CES?, they showcased Cerence?ARK, which will be the first to be released in China by the end of 2019. it is a turnkey voice AI solution specifically built for Chinese automakers. The solution supports multi-language voice interaction base functionality and is available for all major in-vehicle platforms and operating systems.
The biggest highlight of Cerence?ARK is its integration of core voice assistant functions, including wake word, voiceprint verification, automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, and text-to-speech, with the advantages of openness, flexibility, and rapid deployment, making it the choice with the lowest investment cost, shortest development time, and best system performance. With this solution, automakers can create a personalized driving experience for their customers in all aspects, helping drivers and passengers easily customize access to content such as music, navigation, points of interest, news push and more through the system's own AI learning capabilities.
The solution*** is available in three service levels -- Light, Standard and Advanced -- and comes with three key components --?ARK?Edge, ARK?Client and ARK?Cloud. OEMs and suppliers have the flexibility to choose components and deployment options. The overall solution is popular in the market as it requires only a small amount of customization to be delivered, dramatically shortens the time-to-market cycle, and can help automakers and suppliers add value quickly. In addition to a number of Chinese automotive groups, overseas car companies are also interested in this Chinese team-led project. Recently, LG announced that its webOS?Auto?in-vehicle infotainment system will be equipped with Cerence?ARK.
But that's only half a year's worth of results from the company's spin-off, and Cerence is expected to be even more expressive in the Chinese market as time accumulates. Cerence is undoubtedly a strong rival for newcomers to the automotive intelligence industry, which originated from Internet companies.
This article originated from the author of Automotive Home Car, and does not represent the viewpoint position of Automotive Home.