AI in the car
Bosch agrees on AI cooperation with Microsoft
Bosch is aiming for an AI cooperation with Microsoft. photo
© Bernd Weißbrod/dpa
Cars are becoming computers on wheels. As one of the leading suppliers to the automotive industry, Bosch will be cooperating with the software giant Microsoft to bring AI into cars.
Bosch and Microsoft have agreed to cooperate Making cars safer and more comfortable using artificial intelligence. Stefan Hartung, CEO of Bosch, announced this at the “Bosch Connected World” in-house exhibition in Berlin. According to the ideas of the two technology groups, artificial intelligence (AI) will in future enable vehicles to assess situations, react accordingly and thus better protect road users.
Tanja Rückert, a member of the Bosch management board, said that generative AI is an “innovation booster” and could change the industry, similar to how the invention of the computer once did. Generative AI refers to a variant of AI that is able to independently create new content that can hardly be distinguished from human works or even surpasses them. Generative AI can be operated with human language.
Bosch also cooperates with other partners
AI in cars can help to better assess a traffic situation through contextual knowledge, similar to an experienced human driver, said Rückert. As an example, she gave a situation in which a ball rolls onto the street and the AI assumes that a child could probably also run into the street. “A good AI can also distinguish the rolling ball from a scenario in which only an empty plastic bag is blown across the street and emergency braking is not necessary.”
With the cooperation, Bosch gains access to the AI technology of Microsoft partner OpenAI. At the same time, the software company also has enough computing capacity to run complex AI calculations on high-performance computers. Microsoft, in turn, can benefit from the mass of anonymized data generated in Bosch’s vehicle computers.
To feed generative AI for the development of new safety features and other functions, Bosch’s vehicle understanding and car-specific AI expertise will likely prove as valuable as access to vehicle sensor data, Bosch explained.
When it comes to training systems for automated driving, AI quickly reaches its limits today. Current driver assistance systems can already recognize people, animals, objects and vehicles. In the near future, they could use generative AI to determine whether there is a risk of an accident in a given situation. Generative AI trains systems for automated driving based on large amounts of data, from which improved insights are derived.
Also working with AWS and Google
Bosch does not cooperate exclusively with Microsoft in the area of AI, but also works with other important market participants such as AWS and Google. Bosch is also one of the backers who have invested in the most important German AI start-up Aleph Alpha from Heidelberg. This partnership is now beginning to bear fruit, said Rückert.
In North America, Bosch, in collaboration with Aleph Alpha, introduced AI-based speech recognition on behalf of a premium automobile manufacturer. A voice bot understands and answers roadside service calls using natural language processing that also captures dialects, accents and moods. “The waiting time for the driver is reduced to a minimum due to the direct answering of the call.” Already 40 percent of calls could be processed and resolved automatically. The company’s internal chatbot “Ask Bosch” also runs on technology from Aleph Alpha.