STUTTGART/SAN FRANCISCO: Mercedes-Benz and Google Cloud announced on Monday the expansion of their strategic partnership to introduce new conversational capabilities to the MBUX Virtual Assistant, powered by Google Cloud's new Automotive AI Agent.
Built using Gemini on Vertex AI, Google Cloud's Automotive AI Agent is specially tailored for the automotive industry and can reference information from Google Maps Platform to give users more detailed and personalised conversational responses about navigation, points of interest and more.
Google Maps Platform provides Mercedes-Benz owners with fresh and factual information about 250 million places around the world, and the map is updated nearly in real time, with over 100 million updates made to the map each day.
With the enhanced search and navigation experience, users can converse naturally with the MBUX Virtual Assistant and get answers to questions like: "Could you guide me to the nearest fine dining restaurant for a unique culinary experience?"
Källenius, flanked by Sundar (left) and Kurian.
Users can also ask follow-up questions, like: "Does the restaurant have good reviews?" or "What is the chef's signature dish?" and the MBUX Virtual Assistant can respond with accurate, up-to-date information and display navigation details through the vehicle's native interface.
The new experience will be available in the MBUX Virtual Assistant, with the new Mercedes-Benz CLA. It will be the first vehicle designed with the new Mercedes-Benz operating system, MB.OS. A rollout to further models with the MBUX Voice Assistant is also planned.
Google Cloud's Automotive AI Agent will also enable the MBUX Virtual Assistant to handle complex, multi-turn dialogue and can retain memory of conversations, which means users can continue conversations and reference information throughout their drives.
Google Cloud's Automotive AI Agent enables automakers to leverage the power of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to build and deploy customised, first-party, voice assistant experiences with state-of-the-art AI quality.
Automotive AI Agent was built using Google's Gemini models, which enables multimodal reasoning capabilities through natural language speech interactions and uses information from Google Maps Platform.
Present at the announcement were Mercedes-Benz Group AG CEO Ola Källenius, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
