Mercedes Is Making ChatGPT Your Car's New Co-Pilot: Here's Why

Mercedes is bringing OpenAI's conversation bot ChatGPT to its cars, integrating the AI model with its MBUX in-car infotainment system that offers a voice control facility, too. The company will soon be releasing a software update that will allow AI enthusiasts to join the beta program. Fittingly, a person can just utter the magic line, "Hey Mercedes, I want to join the beta program," and they will be added to the beta-tester queue. The opt-in beta testing program starts June 16 and will cover more than 900,000 Mercedes cars that come equipped with the MBUX infotainment hardware. However, the in-car ChatGPT experiment will be limited to the U.S. market in the early phase, with no official word on overseas expansion plans yet.

The beta testing phase in the U.S. will last three months, and the findings will be used to refine the ChatGPT skill before Mercedes expands the convenience to cars sold in other markets. Mercedes won't be the lone wolf in the segment though. General Motors is reportedly exploring ChatGPT integration for its own family of car brands. Semafor reported in March that in partnership with Microsoft, GM was developing a personal assistant built atop the same models as ChatGPT. And just like Mercedes, GM was also reliant on Microsoft's Azure cloud service to bring the ChatGPT-powered assistant to life. A month later, Fullpath also launched a tool based on OpenAI's GPT-4 model targeted at automotive dealerships.

Mercedes putting ChatGPT into its cars and supercharging the onboard voice assistant is a big deal. As for the "why," well, the carmaker says its "Hey Mercedes" voice prompt "will become even more intuitive" with the ChatGPT integration. Broadly speaking, ChatGPT unleashes the MBUX Voice Assistant from the confines of in-car tasks and software, and opens a whole new realm of internet-connected information, without having to learn any complex commands. For example, users can simply summon up the onboard assistant with the "Hey Mercedes" hotword and ask it to find nearby restaurants. The web-scraping chops of ChatGPT will pull up a list of restaurants in the vicinity, and will also read some additional relevant information, just the way ChatGPT responds with an answer summarized from web search results, within seconds.

But the biggest winner would be the in-car MBUX assistant itself. AI assistants, howsoever smart they are, sound robotic and their skills are strictly tied to the software and apps supported on the infotainment system. Mercedes says that adding ChatGPT to the equation will "improve natural language understanding and expand the topics to which it can respond." ChatGPT, with its advanced natural language comprehension skill, effectively crosses the human-machine natural language conversation barrier and also doubles as a rich source of information without asking a person to launch a web browser and do their own research. With voice conversations getting more rewarding, a driver won't have to fiddle with on-screen controls while on the move.