Tokyo Motor Show – Not invented here.

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Existential challenge ahead.

• The star of the Tokyo Motor Show is an electric sports vehicle designed by Toyota which has at its heart an assistant that I think neither Honda nor any other automaker has any chance of ever creating themselves.
• The best hope is for automakers to licence or buy an assistant from elsewhere meaning that it is unlikely to provide them with an exclusive, differentiating product.
• The problem is that digital assistants require a high level of AI in order to function properly which is a skill that none of the automakers, not even Tesla, posses.
• RFM has defines three stages of speech recognition (see here):
  • First: High word accuracy.
  • This has largely been achieved by most speech recognition systems, but it is one thing to know what the user said but quite another to know what he meant.
  • Second: understanding what it is the user is asking for regardless of word order or manner of speech.
  • Third: the ability to understand context and circumstance.
  • I think that it is quite clear that not until machine understanding reaches this third stage that voice can have any hope of providing a user interface that would obviate the use of a screen and be really useful in a vehicle.
  • The two leaders in this space (Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa) both rely heavily on screens and both have products with screens either in the market or in development.
• This is particularly relevant in the automotive industry where for the foreseeable future, the driver will have to have both his hands and his eyes occupied elsewhere.
• Furthermore, it is clear that all of the user interfaces designed by the car makers, Apple and Google are not appropriate for use in the vehicle.
• This is a main reason why I think that users still predominantly use their smartphones for digital services in the vehicle meaning that the best infotainment unit is still the one in the driver’s pocket.
• In my opinion this represents a very serious risk for the car makers long-term.
• This is because all of the value-added services that they are hoping to provide are likely to be delivered via embedded systems in the infotainment unit.
• Consequently, unless the vehicle’s embedded infotainment unit can compete effectively with the smartphone, there is a real risk that all of their digital aspirations will come to naught.
• In this case, the net result is likely to be the big ecosystems taking over the digital experience in the automobile causing the automakers to become little more than handsets on wheels.
• This is a bleak outlook because I think that the automakers badly need revenue from digital services to help offset the weakness in their traditional business likely to be caused by the migration to electric vehicles.
• Failure is not an option for those that wish to survive.