Mercedes shows new infotainment system with ‘natural’ voice control

Mercedes has shown a new infotainment system called Mbux at CES. This can be controlled by speech, whereby users are not bound to predetermined commands. The system should be available in new A-class cars this spring.

Mercedes writes that the system can be called up with: ‘Hey Mercedes’, which is reminiscent of Apple’s ‘Hey Siri’ command. Then users can issue direct and indirect commands. For example, if the driver says: ‘I’m cold’, the system adjusts the interior temperature. ComputerBase reports that service provider Nuance is responsible for processing the voice commands, which takes place both in the car and on the Nuance servers. The system must be able to learn over time and, for example, understand the speaker better.

The car company eventually wants to offer support for 23 languages, initially there will only be support for German and English. Mbux must be regularly provided with ota updates. Furthermore, the system can be operated via a touch-sensitive screen, which allows users to navigate through different menu layers. ComputerBase estimates based on its own observations that the screens have a refresh rate of 60Hz.

The infotainment system runs on chips from Nvidia, which are referred to as Parker 128 and Reilly PX. According to the site, they are also referred to as Tegra X2. The site was unable to request clock speeds from Nvidia or Mercedes, although it could be found that the processor has two Denver 2 and four ARM Cortex A57 cores. In addition, there is a Pascal GPU with 128 and 256 cudacores in the Reilly PX and Parker 128 respectively. According to Mercedes, there is 8GB of RAM.