As car manufacturers team up with the companies behind Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana to bring voice assistants to their cars, BMW has gone in a different direction much like Mercedes-Benz. The company today announced the launch of its own proprietary digital voice assistant. It’s going to be available in models that run the company’s latest operating system version 7.0 starting in March next year.
BMW says that its Intelligent Personal Assistant will play nice with other digital assistants in the future, “thereby providing a link to other rapidly growing ecosystems,” the company says. This suggests that BMW’s assistant can be linked to smart speakers and other connected devices for tasks such as remote start.
“Hey BMW,” is all that people inside the car need to say in order to wake up the assistant. The prompt can be customized so the assistant can be given its own name. You can even call it Alfred if you’re feeling particularly Bruce Wayne-ish.
The assistant will remember the driver’s favorite settings and can activate a combination of them to make the riders more pleasant and comfortable. BMW says that its assistant will be improved consistently so that it’s capable of doing much more. What it didn’t say is whether those updates would arrive over the air or would they require a visit to the dealership.