Remember the Knight Rider intelligent car KITT or the James Bond smart talking cars? Did it sound like a science fiction of a distant future? Well, then I must tell that the future is “now”. And it’s here with BMW.

In 2007 BMW announced their first ‘talking car’, a BMW 3-series convertible equipped with the car conversation system. This system is designed to become an aid to the driver for a easier and smoother communication with the vehicle.

It has been observed that, since driving requires attention of all the senses, yet people can talk and listen comfortably during driving. So, if you want to do something else on your car while driving, you can do it without loosing concentration only if it can be done through voice commands.

The onboard Voice Recognition System is a state-of-the-art technology which is still under development. The main system comprises of a processor which has sensitive “hearing” devices to detect sound signal and recognise the words being pronounced. Sometimes you need to “train” your car to be adapted to “understand” your accent.

This system works in the same way as your voice recognition system of a computer program works. The computer program recognises your voice, find out the sense out of it and then act “intelligently” to respond to the command. Then, depending upon what “car voice” you have chosen, the car will reply to you or give necessary information or just acknowledge your order.

At present the system is in a primitive state, so it can just process simple orders and give a few replies form a limited vocabulary or read from a text. For example you can have following conversation with your car:

On switching on the car the voice says: “Good Morning, Simon!”

You replied: “Good Morning.”

Then you need the air to be cooler. You commanded, “AC cold”.

The car acknowledges, “AC cold” and lower downs the temperature a little.

You need more, “more”.

Then the car replies, “More cool” and keeps on lowering down.

When you are satisfied, you just say, “ok” and it settles there.

Then you might ask: “CD player”, the car acknowledges the order, “switch on CD player” and switches it on automatically. You say “select CD 2”, the car because of poor training might hear wrongly and acknowledge, “select CD 4”, you can immediately interrupt by saying, “no, CD 2”, then the car understands it’s mistake and rectifies.

This way there can be many other options on the car coming through this “talking car” control. However, certainly, it’s still too early to drive your car just saying “come left, enough, speed up, overtake or etc etc…….” Handing over this total control to an automated system might not give you enough time to say finally, “Airbag! Airbag”, because the car couldn’t hear you saying “Brake hard”.