The 2007 Geneva Auto Show

I am attending the Fully Networked Car workshop in Geneva and this workshop is collocated with the 2007 Geneva Auto Show. I have to say that the auto show is a flashy affair! The car companies exhibiting here spared no expense or effort to present their products. Many have giant booths with custom built platforms, a multitude of shiny vehicles that are dusted and polished every few minutes, stage lighting that makes camera flash unnecessary in this indoor environment and (not politically correct, but still a fact of life) booth babes.

Many car companies are addressing global climate change head on. For example, all around Geneva one can see VW company cars displaying the (relatively small) amount of CO2 these cars release into the atmosphere. I also saw a hydrogen fueled car, a natural gas fueled car, small city cars with excellent gas mileage, as well as many hybrid cars, for example by Honda:

In general, small cars are very common in Europe and this is something that I would like to see more of in the US. Full disclosure: my wife and I drive a Ford Focus and a VW Jetta.

I was interested in the use of speech input in cars. I saw three manufacturers who offer speech input in their cars: Jaguar, BMW and Mercedes. All have a press-to-talk (PTT) button which is used to signal to the car the beginning of speech however the end of speech is detected by the car (not by the release of the PTT button as for example in the Project54 system). See, for example, a picture of the Mercedes S-class steering wheel with a PTT button:

Demonstrations of speech technology were not available. In fact the very helpful representatives of the car manufacturers that I talked to clearly did not expect questions about speech input. The person at Jaguar was confused when he tried to change the input/output language of his system. The system was originally set to understand and respond in German. He tried to switch it to English but the system didn’t want to cooperate. His colleague blamed the problems on a low battery in the car (why not connect the car to a charger?). The person showing me the S-class Mercedes had to ask where the microphone is in the car and the person who helped out only pointed out a general area. And I only have my own guess as to where the microphone is in the BMW.

Andrew Kun