Photo: General Motors
General Motors (GM) and Google Cloud today have announced the two companies’ collaboration to help bring conversational AI technology into millions of GM vehicles.
GM’s OnStar Interactive Virtual Assistant (IVA) is powered by algorithms that use Google Cloud’s conversational AI technologies, providing OnStar Members with responses to common inquiries, routing, navigation assistance, and multiple other requests.
Mike Abbott, EVP of software and services at GM, said:
“Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the buying, ownership, and interaction experience inside the vehicle and beyond, enabling more opportunities to deliver new features and services.
“Our software-led approach has accelerated the creation of compelling services for our customers while driving increased efficiency across the GM enterprise. The work with Google Cloud is another example of our efforts to transform how customers engage with our products and services.”
Since 2019, a number of GM models have been designed with Google built-in, giving customers easy access to Google Assistant, Google Maps and Google Play, directly from their vehicles’ centre displays. This collaboration has now expanded to the deployment of Google Cloud’s conversational AI technology, Dialogflow.
With this technology, GM’s OnStar virtual assistant is now handling more than 1 million customer inquiries a month in the U.S. and Canada and is available in most model year 2015 and newer GM vehicles connected by OnStar.
The OnStar IVA assists with common inquiries initiated by the non‑emergency OnStar blue button push in GM vehicles, but also endeavours to distinguish phrases and words that may signify an emergency situation and help to quickly route the call to OnStar’s specially trained emergency Advisors.
GM is also leveraging Google Cloud’s Dialogflow technology to deploy chatbots that can conversationally help answer customer questions about GM vehicles and product features based on the technical information from GM’s extensive vehicle data repositories. With this technology, customers can get quick answers to questions like, “Tell me more about GM’s 2024 EV lineup,” or learn how to take advantage of new technology features in their vehicle.
Want to keep seeing which stories are sparking the mobility community? Sign up to our MOVEMNT newsletter for weekly updates every Thursday 8am
