“After years of determining in absentia how portable devices connect to cars (it’s called ‘iPod integration’ for a reason), Apple became an official automotive supplier when it announced Siri Eyes Free last June,” Doug Newcomb reports for Wired. “Ten months down the road, only GM has [barely] implemented the feature, which uses the car’s on-board voice-recognition hardware as a pass-through to Apple’s cloud-based iPhone ‘virtual assistant.'”
“It’s not surprising that automakers have been slow to integrate Siri Eyes Free due to the long product lead times that prevent cars from keeping pace with consumer electronics, and also difficulties with making ‘running changes’ to production vehicles,” Newcomb reports. “But it’s highly atypical of Apple to introduce a product or feature only to have it take so long to get to market – particularly one introduced with such fanfare.”
Newcomb reports, “‘A car that launches in the 2014 model year was [designed] up to five years ago,’ says Sara LeBlanc, GM’s program manager for MyLink radio. ‘If it’s a new vehicle, they might be able to set up the [software] so it knows when to use Siri and when to use the [embedded] voice rec. And it isn’t like you can figure out the coding for one radio and read it across to the other ones,’ she told Wired. ‘If it’s already in production, then it’s even more complicated.'”
Read more in the full article here.
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