Internet of cars - Are you finally having a real conversation with your car?

I've recently signed a new phone plan changed from an iPhone to a google pixel. I guess the urge of that purchase decision coming from curiosity as well as the need for something new ( with being a loyal iPhone user for the past 7-8 years, I was yarn for a change). I also want to see how good/bad would I adopt a new operating system. And what would be my aha moments when comparing the experiences.

It is to my surprise that the one function I have a strong comparison in mind is the CarPlay.

Singing in the car is important to me, and an energetic song to start the day on the road and a calming tone to soothe the mind on the way home. But you never would give the CarPlay function too many thoughts because when you are connecting to it, it means that 90% of the time you are in a hurry to depart or arrive.So it depends on the software's capability to smoothly functioning in the car.Instead, the user sits with the car and their phone in the garage with the car running and adjusting features.

I enjoy the voice control with pixel carplay; there is no need to push any button, you say "hey google" the CarPlay system would respond with directions, weather, news or calling requirements. With the Siri version of the software, I never got to the point to voice activate the Map and set my destinations while I am driving 80km/hr on the road.

However, the stability of google assistant with carplay is expected to be improved; there is an increasing amount of times that the whole system would just be crushed and not responding at all. I had to manually pull the cable and stick it back in to reconnect. And eventually, I changed back to the iPhone simply because I was missing the simplicity of everything, including the Apple version of Carplay.

The whole experience got me to look into the development space of internet of cars. Has car manufacturers been understanding the trends in developing human-machine connective technologies to be embedded in the car system? Who is leading the way in this space?

I stumbled upon a discussion forum saying Ford is leading the way in developing the interactive car system named SYNC+.

What they found out about designing a good system.

• We want grandma-style UI. The first thing is the control panel must be easy to find functions. In other words, the UI design must be "Big" enough for users to find the part they are looking for while operating a vehicle. This will save the user time and efforts to look for the functions, and accurately targeting the core functions for users to choose from. The less the number of times need for operating the screen, the stronger the operation experience. In the process of driving, the cognitive resources of users are limited. A good system doesn't need to put all the functions in the main interactive interface. They only need to put out the essential functions, such as vehicle information, navigation, listening to songs, etc. At the same time, users should be allowed to set their main interactive interface to meet more user scenarios. 

• 007 is coming true! Preprocess the system set up, give commends to the car before you are getting into the car. Setting the navigation route, heat up the seats, play the song.....while you are still walking to your parking spot. We want to hop into the car and drive away haha. You are using your phone to set the destination and driving route and transmit the navigation information to the vehicle through remote information communication. 

• The voice control. This is my favourite part. The level of language recognition accuracy in the system must be designed in a "not so accurate" way that makes it good enough to understand our oral conversation but not so good enough to pick up grammar mistakes while we are already stressful enough on the road. The voice control aims to save the hassle of having to look into the system and activate the function. If the language recognition could not deliver the commend in an accurate and "less machine logical" way, it would just give another layer of distraction to the users. 

It would be fascinating to see what would the internet of cars be like in the coming days of development as well as how could car manufacturers localise their software design to cater the needs of their local customers. Moving an entire system across might not be the best option, but considering the needs of local consumers indeed might win some hearts over.