General Motors expects to field a proprietary in-car AI assistant later this year, built to fit its customers better than the Google Gemini AI assistant it recently began shipping. The new assistant should have deeper connections to the vehicle, its functions, and its telemetry than Gemini has.
Ask your GM car to change the temperature and it will listen. It can switch the radio and understand casual speech without memorized commands. But Gemini runs on top of the vehicle's systems, and for the most part it works like the assistant on your phone.
GM wants to change that. Before the year is out, the company plans to introduce a native assistant embedded more deeply in the car, one that links conversational AI to GM-specific vehicle knowledge and OnStar intelligence. Anna Santos, director of product management for voice and AI/machine learning at GM, told CNBC that the system will create capabilities "that go beyond what a general purpose assistant can do." Santos declined to disclose a name for the new assistant.
Last year, GM said Gemini would arrive this year across millions of vehicles from the 2022 model year onward, with a GM-designed AI assistant to follow, but it did not share more details then. Earlier this year, GM started enabling Google's Gemini on U.S. Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick, and GMC models from model year 2022 or later that come with Google Built-in.
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GM is also starting to offer "live sessions" where the bot converses in a natural way or leads games such as trivia and 20 questions. Gemini can adjust certain GM vehicle settings, including temperature and radio controls.
"There's a limit to what an AI that's just sort of sitting at the top level of the vehicle can do," Santos said.
The carmaker is developing the technology with an outside company that supplies large language model software.
Santos said the mission is to "understand the vehicle, the drive and our customers' needs, and make everyday ownership simpler." That could mean anticipating maintenance needs, using vehicle telemetry, and handling other car-specific tasks. It could also support a "kids setting" that adjusts music, seats, climate, and door locks for children.
The data involved is proprietary to GM. "Our goal is to make sure that we're bringing the right technology forward to enable us to build the deep vehicle expertise that we want to be able to bring to the AI assistant," Santos said.
"This is the beginning of a broader AI journey for us," Santos said. That expertise stays with GM.
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