Connected cars: Innovations in Intelligent Driving and Integration
Mr. Ghosn announced today at CES that the Renault-Nissan Alliance is continuing its partnership on the development and deployment of advanced connected technologies, such as Microsoft Cortana, an in-vehicle virtual personal assistant. With features such as Cortana speech analytics, drivers can benefit from advanced in-vehicle voice recognition and intuitive human machine interface (HMI).
Cortana will allow the vehicle to adapt to personalized driver settings, even understanding different driver preferences in a shared vehicle, almost making it feel like your own.
The Renault-Nissan Alliance will develop and launch new connected services and applications that make it easier for people to stay connected to work, entertainment and social networks. It will also offer vehicle-centric services that can simplify and enhance engagement with the car through usage-based information, remote access, remote diagnostics and preventive maintenance.
The Renault-Nissan Alliance and Microsoft signed a global, multiyear contract focused on vehicle connectivity and connected services in September 2016.
- The companies will co-develop a mutual vision for connected cars focused on improving the customer experience by making driving more intuitive, intelligent and fun.
- The two companies will work together to develop next-generation connected and mobility services for cars using Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, which is built on Azure, Office 365, Cortana and other intelligent cloud services provided by Microsoft.
- The partnership will enable Renault-Nissan to develop a single global solution providing connected and mobility services for customers across all Alliance brands.
Microsoft Azure:
Next-generation connected services for cars will be delivered using Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, which is built on Microsoft Azure, one of the company's intelligent cloud offerings. This will improve customer experience via advanced navigation, predictive maintenance and vehicle centric services, remote monitoring of car features, external mobile experiences and over-the-air updates.
The Renault-Nissan Alliance selected Azure in part because of its enterprise-grade security, Microsoft's rigorous commitment to compliance, and its unlimited scale. In addition, Azure supports multiple operating systems, programming languages and tools, providing flexibility and choice to build a common platform to deploy services to both Alliance brands.
The New Sound Management Technology by Bose
Today’s drivers face various distractions, leading to thousands of injuries and fatalities annually. To contribute to a safe and enjoyable driving experience, Nissan introduced at CES the new sound management technology developed by Bose that brings order to the ever-expanding non-entertainment audio landscape inside a vehicle cabin. This system increases situational awareness for drivers and helps enhance overall safety on the road.
The Bose new sound management technology is intended to help drivers better process and react to the increasing amount of audible information produced by today’s and next generation’s cars, such as safety prompts, navigation signals, vehicle system alerts, Bluetooth phone calls, and text-to-speech messages.
Bose’s new technology utilizes UltraNearfield headrest speakers and Bose proprietary algorithms to place non-entertainment signals in virtual spaces around the driver, where it intuitively makes the most sense.
A left-turn prompt will be heard by driver’s left ear. A Bluetooth phone call can be delivered in a way that’s primarily heard by the person receiving the call to be less distracting to the other passengers. Drivers can customize some of the sounds and directions.
