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Hyundai and Kia vehicles will ship starting in 2019 with a voice-powered virtual assistant with built in artificial intelligence (AI) that will be unveiled at CES 2018, according to Engadget.

The AI voice assistant, dubbed “Intelligent Personal Agent,” will leverage the connectivity provided by connected cars combined with voice recognition software and will tap into users’ other services to provide valuable assistance as consumers drive about.

Hyundai and Kia are working with SoundHound to develop the AI assistant.SoundHound has built its own voice assistant, called Hound, which will form part of the basis for the Intelligence Personal agent, and is already available to consumers as a smartphone app and through a smart speaker. Hound is one of the most advanced voice assistant apps on the market — it can understand complex questions, answer them in order in rapid succession, and perform speech recognition and natural language processing simultaneously.

In the car, the Intelligent Personal Agent will tap into calendars, mapping platforms, and other services to both respond to and anticipate users’ needs. It will be able to remind the driver, for instance, of an upcoming meeting, and could suggest when to depart for it based on traffic conditions. The AI assistant will also respond to voice queries about things like weather or messaging, and even control factors in the car like the heating systems or door locks, giving the driver safe and hands-free control over many parts of the vehicle.

While the introduction of an AI-powered voice assistant will offer added utility for car owners, the plethora of options available to automakers is starting to lead to a fragmented market. Some companies, such as Ford, have developed their own voice recognition and in-car control platform. Others such as Nissan and BMW are working with Amazon to incorporate the Alexa voice assistant into their vehicles. Hyundai is also already working Kakao on a Korean-language voice assistant for its home market as well.

And companies are also looking to offer infotainment center-based alternatives to Apple CarPlay and Android Auto in order to maintain more control over the in-car experience. But the fragmentation of voice assistants in the car could potentially push consumers more toward Apple’s and Google’s phone-based options as they seek uniformity across different vehicles. This also presents an opportunity for a company like SoundHound, however, to work with numerous automakers to create a voice assistant that could work with multiple auto brands.

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