Techcrunch interview: Talking with (and about) AT&T's WATSON personal assistant

Yesterday, I shared an Engadget video highlighting how the QNX concept car takes advantage of WATSON, AT&T's cloud-based natural-language speech engine. Here's another video, from Jordan Crook of TechCrunch, in which AT&T's Mazin Gilbert describes what WATSON does and QNX's Derek Kuhn demonstrates how WATSON works.

The entire video is interesting, but jump to the 3:30 mark if you want to see the car. The video provides a very nice view of the QNX-equipped dash, btw.



The Engadget video and the TechCrunch video were both shot yesterday at AT&T's "Living the Networked Life" event in New York.

AUTOMOBILE Is HTML5 a good gamble?

As the consumer and automotive worlds continue to collide, HTML5 looks like a good bet. And not a long shot either. In fact, the odds are all automakers will eventually use it. But since the standard won’t be mature for some time yet, should you take a chance on it now? 

To answer this, Andy Gryc talks to Matthew Staikos of RIM. Matthew is the manager of the browser and web platform group at RIM, and has over 10 years of software development experience with a strong focus on WebKit for mobile and embedded systems. Matthew co-founded Torch Mobile, which was acquired by RIM for their browser technology.

Andy’s conversation with Matthew is the subject of the following video, the second in an educational series designed to get an industry-wide perspective on HTML5. 

This interview of Matthew Staikos is the second in a series from QNX on HTML5.

AUTOMOBILE Find me a Starbucks! QNX concept car showcases power of WATSON speech engine

Yes, you can talk to the QNX concept car and tell it what to do.

Recently, our friends at AT&T invited us to bring the concept car to their "Living the Networked Life" event in New York. We said yes, of course! After all, what could be cooler than riding the streets of Gotham City in a digitally pimped-out Porsche 911?

Kidding aside, the event provided an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how the car takes advantage of WATSON, AT&T's natural-language speech engine. To get an idea of what WATSON can do, check out this video from Terrence O'Brien of Engadget:



For the full Engadget article, click here. And stay tuned for more updates from the Living the Networked Life event.

AUTOMOBILE The first-ever QNX technology concept car to hit CES

Paul Leroux

I bet you thought it was the Porsche. Or perhaps even the Bentley. But no, the first QNX-powered technology concept car to appear at CES was a digitally modded Prius — aka the LTE Connected Car. In fact, the car appeared at two CES shows: 2010 and 2015.

If you've never heard of the LTE Connected Car, it was a joint project of several companies, including QNX Software Systems and Alcatel-Lucent. The project members wanted to demonstrate how 4G/LTE networks could transform the driving experience and enable a host of new in-vehicle applications. This kind of thinking of may seem like old hat today, but when the car was created, telecom companies had yet to light up their first commercial LTE towers. The car was definitely ahead of its time.

One of the four infotainment
systems in the LTE Connected Car

Almost everyone saw the entertainment potential of equipping a car with a 4G/LTE broadband connection — the ability to access your favorite music, applications, videos, or social media while on the road had immediate appeal. But many people also saw the other value proposition this car presented: the ability for vehicles to continuously upload information they have gathered about themselves or surrounding road conditions, providing, in the words of WIRED's Eliot Van Buskirk, "a crowd-sourced version of what traffic helicopters do today." Awesome quote, that.

QNX provided the software foundation for the LTE Connected Car, including the OS, touchscreen user interfaces, media players for YouTube and Pandora, navigation system, Bluetooth connectivity, games, and handsfree integration. But why am I blabbing on about this when I could show you? Cue the screen captures...

Google local search
First up is Google local search, which displayed local points of interest to help drivers and passengers find nearby restaurants, gas stations, movie theaters, ATMs, hospitals, and so on. And because this was an LTE-enabled car, the system could fetch these POIs from a cloud-based database:



Pandora Internet radio
For those who prefer to listen to what they like, and nothing else, the car also came with a Pandora app:



Home monitoring and control
Are you the kind of person who forgets to engage the burglar alarm before going to work? If so, the car's home automation app was just the ticket. It could let you manage home systems, such as lights and thermostats, from any of the car’s touchscreens — you could even view a live video feed from home security cameras:



Vehicle diagnostics
Now this is my favorite part. If you look below, you'll see the car's main screen for accessing vehicle diagnostics. At the upper right is the virtual mechanic app, which retrieved OBD-II codes from the vehicle bus to display the status of your brakes, tires, power train, electrical systems, fluids, and so on. (The current QNX CAR Platform for Infotainment includes an updated version of this app.)



Low oil pressure... yikes!
The virtual mechanic wouldn't fix your car for you. But it could tell you when things were going south and help you take appropriate action — before the problem escalated. In this case, it's saying that the engine oil pressure is low:



What to do? Well, if you were mechanically challenged, you could tap the fuel pump icon at the bottom of the screen to display a map of local service stations. Or you could tap on the dealership icon (Toyota, in this case) and find directions to the nearest, well, dealership:



The virtual mechanic would also let you zoom in on specific systems. For instance, in the following screen, the user has tapped the brake fluid button to learn the location of the brake fluid reservoir:



On the subject of zooming, let's zoom out for a second to see the entire car:



Moving pictures
Screen captures and photos can say only so much. For the back story on the LTE Connected Car, check out this video, which digs into the "philosophy" of the car and what the project members were working to accomplish:

---

An LTE Connected Car reader

• Scientific American — Hot Spot Hot Rod: The Internet Invades the Automobile
• Wired — Next-Gen Car Dashboard Talks to the Cloud
• Engadget — LTE Connected Car redefines the 'mobile' in mobile broadband
• John Day’s Automotive Electronic News — Alcatel-Lucent launches LTE Connected Car from QNX platform
• GIGAOM — LTE Connected Car: Dude, Where’s My Display?
• AutoSpies — Is THIS The Future Of Auto Tech?
• PCMag.com Blogs — What Do You Want in a Web-Connected Car?
• The Inquirer — Alcatel-Lucent talks up connected vehicles
• Stuff.tv — ng Connect turns Prius into living room

AUTOMOBILE OTA software: not just building castles in the air

Tina Jeffrey

After attending Telematics Detroit earlier this month, I realized more than ever that M2M will become the key competitive differentiator for automakers. With M2M, automakers can stay connected with their vehicles and perhaps more importantly, vehicle owners, long after the cars have been driven off dealer lots. Over-the-air (OTA) technology provides true connectivity between automakers and their vehicles, making it possible to upgrade multiple systems, including electronic control unit (ECU) software, infotainment systems that provide navigation and smartphone connectivity, and an ever-increasing number of apps and services.

Taken together, the various systems in a vehicle contain up to 100 million lines of code — which makes the 6.5 million lines of code in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner seem like a drop in the proverbial bucket. Software in cars will only continue to grow in both amount and complexity, and the model automakers currently use to maintain and upgrade vehicle software isn’t scalable.

Vehicle owners want to keep current with apps, services, and vehicle system upgrades, without always having to visit the dealer. Already, vehicle owners update many infotainment applications by accepting software pushed over the air, just like they update applications on their smartphones. But this isn’t currently the case for ECUs, which require either a complete module replacement or module re-flashing at a dealership.

Pushing for updates
Automakers know that updates must be delivered to vehicle owners in a secure, seamless, and transparent fashion, similar to how OTA updates are delivered to mobile phones. Vehicle software updates must be even more reliable given they are much more critical.


BlackBerry’s OTA solution: Software Update Management for Automotive service

With OTA technology, automakers will use wireless networks to push software updates to vehicles automatically. The OTA service will need to notify end-users of updates as they become available and allow the users to schedule the upgrade process at a convenient time. Large software updates that may take a while to download and install could be scheduled to run overnight while the car is parked in the garage, making use of the home Wi-Fi connection. Smaller size updates could be delivered over a cellular connection through a tethered smartphone, while on a road trip. In this latter scenario, an update could be interrupted, for instance, if the car travels into a tunnel or beyond the network area.

A win-win-win
Deployment of OTA software updates is a winning proposition for automakers, dealers, and vehicle owners. Automakers could manage the OTA software updates themselves, or extend the capability to their dealer networks. Either way, drivers will benefit from the convenience of up-to-date software loads, content, and apps with less frequent trips to the dealer. Dealership appointments would be limited to mechanical work, and could be scheduled automatically according to the vehicle’s diagnostic state, which could be transmitted over the air, routinely, to the dealer. With this sharing of diagnostic data, vehicle owners would better know how much they need to shell out for repairs in advance of the appointment, with less chance of a shocking repair-cost phone call.

OTA technology also provides vehicle owners and automakers with the ability to personalize the vehicle. Automaker-pushed content can be carefully controlled to target the driver’s needs, reflect the automaker's brand, and avoid distraction — rather than the unrestricted open content found on the internet, which could be unsafe for consumption while driving. Overall, OTA software updates will help automakers maintain the customers they care about, engender brand loyalty, and provide the best possible customer experience.

Poised to lead
Thinking back to Telematics Detroit, if the number of demos my BlackBerry colleagues gave of their Software Update Management for Automotive service is any indication, OTA will transform the auto industry. According to a study from Gartner ( “U.S. Consumer Vehicle ICT Study: Web-Based Features Continue to Rise” by Thilo Koslowski), 40 percent of all U.S. vehicle owners either “definitely want to get” or at least are “likely to get” the ability for wireless software updates in their next new vehicle — making it the third most demanded automotive-centric Web application and function.

BlackBerry is poised to lead in this space, given their expertise in infrastructure, security, software management, and close ties to automotive. They were leaders in building an OTA solution for the smartphone market, and now again are among the first entrants in enabling a solution that is network, hardware, firmware, OS, software, and application agnostic.

AUTOMOBILE Building smartphone-caliber connectivity into cars

Paul Leroux

Implementing cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity in a vehicle is never trivial. But with the right technology, the task can become a lot simpler.

When it comes to selling cars, just how important is connectivity? Can the services provided by connected cars, such as Internet radio, remote diagnostics, and real-time traffic information, influence vehicle buying decisions? And if so, how much?

In 2015, telecom giant Telefónica decided to find out. In a survey of 5000 consumers, the company found that 71% of respondents were interested in using, or were already using, connected car services. Other studies report similar findings. Parks Associates, for example, found that 78% of people who already own a connected car will demand connectivity features in their next vehicle.

Of course, “connected car” means different things to different people. It could, for example, refer to a car that has a built-in cellular modem, or to a car that uses the driver’s smartphone to access online services. Moreover, the features offered by my connected car may differ completely from the features offered by your connected car. But no matter what form it takes, or what applications it enables, connectivity in the car can be a challenge to implement. In a recent blog post on LinkedIn, Roger Lanctot of Strategy Analytics attests to this difficulty, stating that nearly every car maker seeking to implement connectivity has stumbled on issues ranging from bad connections and poor user interfaces to interminable delays.

Consider, for example, the challenge of embedding a cellular modem in a vehicle — or any other embedded device, for that matter. Initializing and managing the modem requires a large set of software that, among other things, must:

• handle modem reset and recovery, because even the best modems crash
• monitor and manage power consumption to optimize current draw
• ensure data throughput and reliability
• reduce or eliminate call-drops and call-setup failures

The challenge doesn’t stop there. Network operators, for example, are paying more attention to M2M connections on their networks, thereby increasing the demand for operator-approved modems and modules. Meanwhile, system designers may need to swap out modems to target different regions or price points, or to take advantage of newer, more capable modem technology. The goal, then, is to implement a flexible, future-proofed design that can accommodate such changes with a bare minimum of fuss.

Enter a new webinar hosted by my colleagues Karen Bachman and Leo Forget. In “Applying smartphone wireless technology to connected embedded systems,” they will examine the challenges of embedding wireless connectivity and explore how to address these challenges through software frameworks developed for smartphones and other mobile devices. True to the title, Karen and Leo will look at use cases not just for automotive, but for other industries as well, such as medical and industrial. The bulk of the conversation, though, will focus on common issues that embedded developers face, regardless of the device type they are building.

Attend this webinar to learn about:

• Applications that stand to benefit the most from wireless connectivity
• Challenges and complexity of bringing connectivity to cars and other embedded systems
• Potential security and privacy risks introduced by wireless connectivity, including unauthorized access and unencrypted data transfer
• The benefits of creating flexible products that easily accommodate advances in modem technology

Here are the webinar coordinates:

Applying smartphone wireless technology to connected embedded systems
Thursday, March 26, 2015
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm EST
Register: TechOnLine

AUTOMOBILE My next car will know when I'm in a good mood

It will also know when I'm sad, grumpy, or just plain mad. Okay, it won't quite figure it out on its own — I will have to tell it. How will my car get so smart? Because Gracenote has been working to personalize the music experience in a way that dynamically adapts content to the driver’s mood and musical taste.

It's not just about play-listing locally stored content and displaying album art anymore. The folks at Gracenote can now merge multiple occupants’ music collections and find common ground. They can create stations that incorporate cloud-based content from multiple sources. And they can adapt the nature of the content played in the car to the mood of the occupants through their Mood Grid technology.

This not only makes the music experience intensely personal but it does it automagically, keeping the driver’s eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. Here’s a short video from 2015 CES that provides a quick overview — on a system powered by QNX technology, of course :-)

AUTOMOBILE Making of the QNX concept car... honest

We created this video as a backdrop for CES 2015 where we unveiled the latest QNX concept car (a Porsche 911). Good thing, too, as people clearly stated that they would not have believed we did this cool retrofit ourselves without proof.

AUTOMOBILE Finally, I can throw away my 8 tracks

Okay, maybe I'm not old enough to have owned 8-track tapes. But I do remember that my uncle had an 8-track player in the dash of his station wagon when I was a kid, and I am old enough to have owned a car with a cassette player.

Music has been fundamental to the driving experience for about as long as cars have been on the road. Terrestrial radio dominated forever, supplemented by tape and then CD. XM radio came along in 2001 and connecting your iPod started to show up in the late 2000s. That's 5 formats since the Model T was introduced in 1908 (okay, so it didn't  have a radio) and 3 formats in the first 90 years.

Now, with connected cars becoming a reality, the rate of change is shifting into overdrive. Want Pandora – check. Want to listen to the top alternative radio station in Dublin while driving in California – check. Want to keep listening to your Songza programming as you move from the house to the car – check.

Today's announcement from QNX and 7Digital adds a whole new dimension. Having 7Digital in the car will unify the music ownership experience across the big three: car, pocket, and home. Want to listen to your own music programming in the car – check. Want to buy a song you just heard on that Dublin radio station – check.

Read the press release for details. And when you're done, check out the 7digital blog.

AUTOMOBILE Ontario tech companies team up to target the connected car

To predict who will play a role tomorrow's connected vehicles, you need to look beyond the usual suspects.

When someone says “automobile,” what’s the first word that comes to mind? Chances are, it isn’t Ontario. And yet Ontario — the Canadian province that is home to QNX headquarters — is a world-class hub of automotive R&D and manufacturing. Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, and Toyota all have plants here. As do 350 parts suppliers. In fact, Ontario produced 2.5 million vehicles in 2015 alone.

No question, Ontario has the smarts to build cars. But to fully appreciate what Ontario has to offer, you need to look beyond the usual suspects in the auto supply chain. Take QNX Software Systems, for example. Our roots are in industrial computing, but in the early 2000s we started to offer software technology and expertise to the world’s automakers and tier one suppliers. And now, a decade later, QNX offers the premier platform for in-car infotainment, with deployments in tens of millions of vehicles.

QNX Software Systems is not alone. Ontario is home to many other “non-automotive” technology companies that are playing, or are poised to play, a significant role in creating new automotive experiences. But just who are these companies? The Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association (APMA) of Canada would like you to know. Which is why they've joined forces with QNX and other partners to build the APMA Connected Vehicle.

A showcase for Ontario technology.

The purpose of the vehicle is simple: to showcase how Ontario companies can help create the next generation of connected cars. The vehicle is based on a Lexus RX350 — built in Ontario, of course — equipped with a custom-built infotainment system and digital instrument cluster built on QNX technology. Together, the QNX systems integrate more than a dozen technologies and services created in Ontario, including gesture recognition, biometric security, emergency vehicle notification, LED lighting, weather telematics, user interface design, smartphone charging, and cloud connectivity.

Okay, enough from me. Time to nuke some popcorn, dim the lights, and hit the Play button:

AUTOMOBILE Am I crazy for talking to my car?

Earlier this afternoon, I participated in a connected car panel at SpeechTEK 2015, hosted by our friend Mazin Gilbert from AT&T. The other panelists included Greg Bielby of VoltDelta, Thomas Schalk of Agero, and Hakan Kostepen of Panasonic.

Even though Mazin did a fantastic job, not every panelist had a chance to answer every question. I was itching to answer some, so here are my responses to the questions that I didn't get to answer, or where I feel I could have provided a more complete response.

Have speech technologies matured to the point where they can be used robustly in the car? The general answer to this question from the panel was yes, but I think the real answer is a qualified yes. The technologies exist, but often aren't applied or may need auto-specific adaptations to handle in-cabin noise or other issues. Natural language recognition was an oft-stated driving technology, but a missing piece to the puzzle is hybrid recognition. I don't mean pushing recognition wholesale to the cloud, like Siri does. I mean a true split of the recognition effort, where each part does what it’s best at. Put the front half of acoustic processing in the vehicle to clean up the audio and convert the waveform to frequency-domain data, then send the data to the cloud-based server. The cloud server can then parse and interpret the data, and send back the result.

Hybrid speech rec solves three problems at once: better audio signals (the car can improve audio specific to the in-cabin environment), better cost (frequency data is far more compressed than raw audio, so you pay less for data transfer), and better responsiveness (hybrid rec gives the server time to start working on the response while it's coming in instead of waiting for the whole utterance to finish before starting).

Is driver distraction a major business driver, or is it the "Siri effect"? Currently, the car industry seems to use driver distraction as a reason to push a lot of features into speech. Many of those uses are gimmicky. Personally, I don't care if I can set my climate control system with voice — why would I when I can simply turn a dial? I once had someone ask me about the feasibility of adding voice recognition commands for rolling down the windows. I asked him, "Yes, but wouldn't people just push the window button?"

We shouldn’t implement speech commands just because we can. They may have contributed to excitement in the early adopter crowd, but we're beyond that now. Mind you, there are some seriously useful ways to use voice. For instance, any time you need to pick from a huge number of choices, voice recognition is the natural way to go. Calling contacts ("Call Sarah Potter"), entering destinations ("Go to 3121 South Park Street"), or picking music ("Play Audioslave") are all much easier than using an HMI to enter the same information, and safer to boot. It just has to work consistently and accurately.

Will car makers see more speech moving to the cloud, or will it be a hybrid of cloud and embedded? I disagree with the majority of the panel on this one, and, I think, the majority of people in the industry. Most auto people believe a hybrid between embedded and cloud allows the best of both worlds — good recognition and updatability when connected, and consistent reliability when not. My colleague Andrew Poliak also champions this view with a memorable catch phrase: Zombie Apocalypse. That is, you still want the system to work, albeit partially, when the infrastructure isn't available.

But if you ask me, everyone is missing the point — theirs is a technology-centric point of view. Everyday customer acceptance of a particular technology is notoriously harsh: if it doesn't work well, it gets rejected out of hand. Good cloud solutions beat an embedded solution hands-down; they just need some improvements (see my hybrid bullet above). Once a customer experiences a good solution, they will become frustrated with one that performs poorly. In my opinion, it's better not to offer the service at all, than to try a graceful degradation of capability, because most customers won't understand or care. Spend the effort instead on making sure you always have an acceptable cloud connection — either through multiple redundant mechanisms or a car-based powerful antenna — and you'll be better off. Even when the car knows some data that the cloud doesn't (like a mobile's contact list or music selection), there's no need to handle that on the embedded side. The cloud recognition server is powerful enough to not require the data set a priori. And I think we can predict an eventual migration of phone data to cloud-based data (or cloud-synchronized data) that makes the car's knowledge either easily transferrable or less relevant.

Who makes money, and how, from voice-enabled agents or voice services? This was one of the best questions of the panel, because nobody really knows the exact model, but everybody agreed that customer tolerance is very low. The most likely candidate is ad-based revenue. This doesn't mean reading ads aloud to the driver, but rather, positively influencing search results for either active or temporary situation-based points of interest (POIs). Depending on how valuable the service is to the driver, there will still be an option for service-based payments and high-value apps.

Standards and building mobile apps — will it come? You need standards if you want to build an app platform that will promote application creation and adoption. That's what we're doing with the QNX CAR 2 application platform — creating a way for someone other than the car companies to join the ecosystem and to deploy their apps to the car in a controlled way. But don't forget, you need a standard way to deploy apps for the cloud half of the recognition, too.

To close, let me share two photos. One was taken outside the Marriott Marquis, the hotel hosting the conference just off of Times Square in NYC. The other is from our PR agency, Breakaway Communications. What do they have in common? Wooden water towers. Sorry, I couldn't help myself; I just love those things. They just look so quaint in a city full of glass and brick.

What’s HTML5 got to do with automotive?

There’s been a lot of noise lately about HTML5. A September 2015 report by binvisions shows that search engines and social media web sites are leading the way toward adoption: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, and plenty more have already transitioned to HTML5. Some are taking it even further: Facebook has an HTML5 Resource Center for developers and the Financial Times has a mobile HTML5 version of their website.

It won’t be long before HTML5 is ubiquitous. We think automakers should (and will) use it. 

To elucidate the technology and its relevance, we’ve created a series of educational videos on the topic. Here is the first in that series. Interviews with partners, customers, and industry gurus will soon follow. 

This simple overview is the first in a series from QNX on HTML5. (Personally I like the ending the best.)

Is this the most jazzed-up Jeep ever to hit CES?

The fourth installment in the CES Cars of Fame series. Our inductee for this week: a Jeep that gets personal.

Paul Leroux

It might not be as hip as the Prius or as fast as the Porsche. But it's fun, practical, and flexible. Better yet, you can drive it just about anywhere. Which makes it the perfect vehicle to demonstrate the latest features of the QNX CAR Platform for Infotainment.

It's called the QNX reference vehicle, and it's been to CES in Las Vegas, as well as to Detroit, New York City, and lots of places in between. It's our go-to vehicle for whenever we want to hit the road and showcase our latest infotainment technology. It even made a guest appearance at IBM's recent Information On Demand 2015 Big Data conference, where it demonstrated the power of connecting cars to the cloud.

The reference vehicle, which is based on a Jeep Wrangler, serves a different purpose than our technology concept cars. Those vehicles take the QNX CAR Platform as a starting point to demonstrate how the platform can help automakers hit new levels of innovation. The reference vehicle plays a more modest, but equally important, role: to show what our the platform can do out of the box.

For instance, we updated the Jeep recently to show how version 2.1 of the QNX CAR Platform will allow developers to blend a variety of application and HMI technologies on the same display. In this case, the Jeep's head unit is running a mix of native, HTML5, and Android apps on an HMI built with the Qt application framework:



Getting personal
We also use the Jeep to demonstrate the platform's support for customization and personalization. For instance, here is the first demonstration instrument cluster we created specifically for the Jeep:



And here's a more recent version:



These clusters may look very different, but they share the same underlying features, such as the ability to display turn-by-turn directions, weather updates, and other information provided by the head unit.

Keeping with the theme of personalization, the Jeep also demonstrates how the QNX CAR Platform allows developers to create re-skinnable HMIs. Here, for example, is a radio app in one skin:



And here's the same app in a different skin:



This re-skinnability isn't just cool; it also demonstrates how the QNX CAR Platform can help automotive developers create a single underlying code base and re-use it across multiple vehicle lines. Good, that.

Getting complementary
The Jeep is also the perfect vehicle to showcase the ecosystem of complementary apps and services integrated with the QNX CAR Platform, such as the (very cool) street director navigation system from Elektrobit:



To return to the question, is this really the most jazzed-up Jeep to hit CES? Well, it will be making a return trip to CES in just a few weeks, with a whole new software build. So if you're in town, drop by and let us know what you think.

Seamless connectivity is for more than online junkies

As much as I’m not always enamored with sitting behind a computer all day, I find being off the grid annoying. Remember this email joke?

You know you’re an online junkie when you:
• wake up at 3:00 am to go to the bathroom and stop to check your email on the way back to bed
• rarely communicate with your mother because she doesn’t have email
• check your inbox. It says ‘no new messages,’ so you check it again 

Even though this joke circulated several years ago, it still strikes a chord. The big difference now is that there’s no longer a subculture of ‘online junkies.’ From the time we wake up in the morning to the time we go to bed, we all want to be connected — and that includes when we get behind the wheel. So to this joke I would add:

• resent driving because it means going off the grid

At QNX, we’re working toward a seamless experience where people can enjoy the same connectivity whether they’re texting their spouse from the mall or checking traffic reports while driving down the highway. See what I mean:



For more information about the technology described in this video, visit the QNX website.
 

QNX at CES: a key fob on steroids

Have you ever wished that your key fob could do more than lock and unlock doors, and chirp your horn? If so, you’ll be interested in some great tech that QNX Software Systems has developed in partnership with DotLinker and is demonstrating this week at CES.

To show what this technology can do, we’ve created a custom “key fob” app that connects to our Mercedes-Benz CLA45 AMG technology concept car. The app is written in HTML5, our cross-platform language of choice, so it will run on any smartphone. Here is the app’s main menu:



Remote repair, over the air
A really cool feature of this technology is that the connection to your car is hosted on a cloud service, thanks to our DotLinker integration. This approach could allow multiple devices owned by you, your spouse, or your kids to access the vehicle's state simultaneously. It could also allow your dealership to access the vehicle’s state online — with your permission of course — without having you bring the car into the shop. The dealer tech could simply pull up a management console on an iPad to see what’s wrong, order the parts you need, and book a single, quick fix-it appointment:



If the problem can be fixed by software, that same technician could make changes over the air. It might be as simple as setting a Bluetooth pairing option that you can’t find (aka remote device management), or downloading new software to the car (aka firmware over-the-air updates):



Dodging the vortex
How about a remote start from anywhere? The Buick Enclave with OnStar shows just how nice this can be when it’s bitter cold outside and you’re beyond traditional key-fob distance. This feature should come in handy this week with the dreaded “Polar Vortex”! Also, you never know when a coworker might need to borrow your ice scraper out of the trunk — stay nice and warm inside while he or she gets it. If it ever does get back to hot summer days (and it will, eventually), this same remote access could let you open your car’s sunroof or windows.

The key fob app supports remote start; remote open/close of doors, windows, roof, and trunk; and, for good measure, remote control of turn signals:




Where did I park that thing?
“Hey kids, meet me back at the car!” Finding your vehicle’s location is a modern necessity, especially when the parking lot is bigger than the state of Rhode Island. Okay, the Las Vegas Convention Center isn’t that big, but it sure feels that way by the end of the show:



Backseat DJ
Finally, what about controlling the car’s media player from the phone? Let your kids DJ the car’s playlist from the back seat from their tablets or smartphones to keep the trip to Grandma’s entertaining. Just remember you gave them that power when they dish up their favorite screamo band, “A Scar for the Wicked”.



What if?
Now imagine... what if your next car came with a key-fob app? What features would you hope to see? And what do you think would be the killer key-fob feature of all time? Over-the-air updates? Remote location tracking? Or something completely different?

It's a Bentley! A guided tour of the new QNX technology concept car

"Bend it, shape it, any way you want it"
— Headline from a QNX advertisement, circa 1987

I’m about to show you some pictures of a car. Not just any car, but a powerful, luxurious, and stunningly beautiful car. A car that has undergone a technological transformation.

If you’re like me, you'll be fascinated by the car’s features, some of which have never been seen in a vehicle — until now. But if you can, remember that it isn’t just about the cool features. It’s also about the platform that enabled them.

I’m speaking, of course, of the QNX CAR application platform.

We created the new QNX technology concept car — a modified Bentley Continental GT — to demonstrate that flexibility and customization form the very DNA of the QNX CAR platform. If you’ve seen the QNX reference vehicle, you already know that the platform provides an extremely rich environment for in-car infotainment, complete with HMI frameworks, smartphone integration, an HTML5 engine, a mobile device gateway, and a host of pre-integrated partner technologies — everything to kickstart our customers' projects. But in the automotive world, differentiation is everything. So it’s just as important that the platform enables customers to add their own branding, features, and sizzle. And to do it quickly.

Ease of branding and
personalization is just one

of the capabilities of the
QNX CAR platform.

Which is where the new concept car comes in. To create it, we used the same base QNX CAR platform that we offer our customers. But when you compare the Bentley to the Jeep, which uses a stock version of QNX CAR, the differences are dramatic: different features, different branding, and a different look-and-feel. In effect, the Jeep shows what QNX CAR can do out of the box, while the Bentley shows what QNX CAR lets you do once you start bending it to your imagination. One platform, many possibilities.

Which brings me to the slogan at the top of this post. It's amazing to think that a core value of QNX technology in the 1980s — giving customers the flexibility to achieve what they want to do — remains just as true today. Some values, it seems, are worth keeping.

And now, the car…
I know that you’re anxious to peek inside the car and see what we’ve done. But before we go any further, take a moment to savor the car’s beautifully sculpted exterior. This is one classy set of wheels. In fact, if you ask me, the wheels alone are worth the price of admission:



The awesome (and full HD) center stack
Okay, time to hop in — but get ready to prop up your jaw. Because the first thing you’ll notice is the jaw-droppingly beautiful center stack. This immense touchscreen features a gracefully curved surface, full HD graphics, and TI’s optical touch input technology, which allows a physical control knob to be mounted directly on the screen — a feature that’s cool and useful. (In the photo below, the clock display appears within the knob.)

The center stack supports a host of applications, including a 3D navigation system from Elektrobit that makes full use of the display. Just check out this bird’s-eye view of the Las Vegas Strip:



So how big is the display? Big enough to provide access to other functions, such as the car’s media player or virtual mechanic, and still have plenty room for navigation. Check it out:



The awesome (and very polite) voice rec system
Time to talk to the car. Just say “Hello Bentley,” and the car’s voice recognition system immediately comes to life and begins to interact with you — in a British accent, no less. You can now tell the media player what you’d like to hear and the navigation system where you’d like to go.

To provide natural language speech recognition, the system uses the cloud-based AT&T Watson speech engine, as well as an “intent framework” from QNX. It also uses keyword spotting technology from Sensory so you can start the system simply by talking to it.

The awesome (and nicely integrated) smartphone support
The Bentley also showcases how the QNX CAR platform enables automakers to offer advanced integration with popular smartphones. For instance, the car can communicate with a smartphone to stream music, or to provide notifications of incoming email, news feeds, and other real-time information — all displayed in a manner appropriate to the automotive context. Here's an example:



The awesome (and just plain fun) web app
I know, I know: the car looks cool, but you’re not at CES this week to see it first-hand. But how about the next best thing? Just connect to the web app and keep tabs on the Bentley in real time. (Note: The car will go online later this morning.) The app lets you view a variety of data that the car publishes to the cloud, such as what song the infotainment system is playing and whether someone has just opened a door. It also displays information that would be extremely helpful if this were your personal car, such as fluid levels and tire pressure. (This is a preliminary screen for the app, so I'm not sure if the tire pressures are realistic.)



UPDATE: The web app is now live, and the desktop version features a live camera feed of the Bentley and Jeep. Check it out!



The awesome (and very configurable) digital instrument cluster
The instrument cluster is implemented entirely in software, though you would hardly know it — the virtual gauges are impressively realistic. But more impressive still is the cluster’s ability to morph itself on the fly. Put the car in Drive, and the cluster will display a tach, gas gauge, temperature gauge, and turn-by-turn directions — the cluster pulls these directions from the center stack’s navigation system (cool, that). Put the car in Reverse, and the cluster will display a video feed from the car’s backup camera.



There are other options as well. For instance, the cluster can display information from the media player or display the current weather:



The awesome everything else
I’ve only scratched the surface of what the car can do. For instance, it also provides:

• Advanced multimedia system — Offers direct support for Pandora radio and the first embedded in-car implementation of the Shazam music discovery service.
   
• Video conferencing with realistic telepresence — Separate cameras for the driver and passenger provide independent video streams, while high-definition voice technology from QNX offers expanded bandwidth for greater realism, as well as stereo telepresence for making the remote caller sound as if they’re sitting right next to you.
   
• LTE connectivity — The car features an LTE radio modem, as well as a Wi-Fi hotspot for devices you bring into the car.

Super size those images
Want to see the center stack and instrument cluster in all their high-resolution glory? Just check out our QNX Flickr account.

That's all for now, but stay tuned: We’ll have plenty more news for you today and all through this week.