Led by Amazon Alexa, Nuance and Voicebox Technologies, the AGL Speech Expert Group is developing open APIs to voice-enable every application in the vehicle
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 28, 2018 – Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open platform for the connected car, today announced the launch of two new Expert Groups (EG) focused on Speech Recognition and Vehicle-to-Cloud (V2C) connectivity.
“Our goal is to voice-enable every application in the vehicle, but the challenge today is that developers have to manually integrate with each automaker’s preferred speech recognition engine,” said Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux at The Linux Foundation. “We plan to provide a standard set of open APIs that allows developers to write their application only once, and it will work on any system from any automaker using AGL, regardless of the underlying speech recognition technology. We believe this is the first time such standardization is being implemented in the industry, and this will greatly reduce fragmentation and create an ecosystem of speech-enabled apps for the vehicle.”
Led by Amazon Alexa, Nuance Communications and Voicebox Technologies, the Speech EG will also provide guidance for supporting technologies including natural language, grammar development tools, on-board vs cloud based speech, and signal processing for noise reduction and echo cancellation.
“This working group has a tremendous opportunity to move in-car voice technology forward in ways that will delight customers,” said John Scumniotales, Director of Products, Amazon Alexa Automotive. “We envision that customers will have a voice service like Alexa with them throughout their day, with continuity between their home and their car. Making it simpler for automakers to implement voice services is a big step toward this vision – we’re excited to join this working group and innovate on new ways to improve the voice experience for customers.”
“We are proud to be a founding member of the Speech Expert Group and fully share in the mission of creating a standardized set of speech recognition APIs,” said Eric Montague, Sr. Director, Product Marketing and Strategy, Automotive Speech, Nuance Communications, Inc. “Our Dragon Drive automotive platform powers more than 200 million cars on the road today across more than 40 languages, creating conversational experiences for major automakers worldwide. We look forward to bringing this expertise to the Group and working together to make the future of automotive speech interfaces a reality.”
“Voicebox is proud to participate in AGL’s Speech Expert Group. Our 15 years of experience in developing embedded, cloud, and third party speech solutions for customers like Toyota, Subaru, AT&T, Renault, and Mazda, will be an asset as we work within AGL to develop standardized speech APIs,” said Sam Menaker, Senior Vice President of Customer Engineering, Voicebox Technologies. “In addition to our Speech API work, Voicebox will work with AGL on developing Natural Language Understanding (NLU) APIs and toolchains to support the next generation of Speech and NLU scenarios, ensuring that automakers using AGL stay ahead of the game.”
AGL has also launched a Vehicle-to-Cloud EG that is exploring use cases such as telematics, personalization, authentication and authorization. Led by ForgeRock, the V2C EG will be responsible for implementing the reference architecture and services such as IoT protocols for connecting the vehicle to the cloud, connected car features, over-the-air upgrades, remote vehicle interactions, identity management and location-based services.
“The automotive industry’s evolution to a service-driven, smart mobility ecosystem is transforming focus from vehicle unit sales to personalized mobility experiences that will depend on cloud connectivity and a new wave of connected sensor data,” said Ashley Stevenson, Identity Technology Director, ForgeRock. “By leveraging the knowledge and experience of its diverse member roster, the AGL Vehicle-to-Cloud expert group is well positioned to help address the growing need for connected vehicles to communicate and relay sensor data with a wide variety of cloud services using secure, privacy-enhancing and standardized methods.”
Initial meetings for the Speech EG and V2C EG have already kicked off and discussions continued during the bi-annual AGL All Member Meeting (AMM) held February 20-21 in Tokyo. The AMM brings the AGL community together to learn about the latest developments, share best practices and collaborate to drive rapid innovation across the industry.
About Automotive Grade Linux (AGL)
Automotive Grade Linux is a collaborative open source project that is bringing together automakers, suppliers and technology companies to accelerate the development and adoption of a fully open software stack for the connected car. With Linux at its core, AGL is developing an open platform from the ground up that can serve as the de facto industry standard to enable rapid development of new features and technologies. Although initially focused on In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI), AGL is the only organization addressing all software in the vehicle, including instrument cluster, heads up display, telematics, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. The AGL platform is available to all, and anyone can participate in its development. Learn more: https://www.automotivelinux.org/
Automotive Grade Linux is hosted at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems.
About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.
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Emily Olin
Automotive Grade Linux
eolin@linuxfoundation.org
