Mercedes-Benz Puts ChatGPT in the Driver’s Seat

Since June 16, drivers with the MBUX Voice Assistant service Hey Mercedes, available in more than 900,000 vehicles, have been able to participate in Mercedes’s three-month ChatGPT beta program. The program is optional, and drivers can enroll in the program through their Mercedes app or with the voice command, “Hey Mercedes, I want to join the beta program.”

Mercedes claims Hey Mercedes will become capable, intuitive, and humanlike through the ChatGPT integration.

With the new integration, Hey Mercedes will still be able to complete its regular set of commands, which include turning up the volume, adjusting the temperature, providing you with real-time weather reports, adding a stop to your drive, and making a phone call.

On top of its normal set of functions, the system will benefit from significant conversation upgrades that allow it to:

• Engage in natural, humanlike conversation
• Maintain a back-and-forth dialogue with the driver (or passengers)
• Remember conversations so you can pick up where you left off without having to provide additional context
• Respond to a wide set of questions and offer suggestions about your surrounding area and destination
• Provide you with recommendations unrelated to your drive, like last-minute dinner recipes or birthday gift ideas
• Send texts via voice-to-text commands
• Answer complex questions about niche or technical topics
• Purchase concert/movie tickets and make restaurant reservations for you

While Mercedes aims to generate ease and convenience for drivers, some studies show that voice-activated car assistants aren’t any safer than using a phone while driving. Research from Texas A&M University shows that driver response times are significantly delayed when people text and drive, even if they’re using a voice-to-text assistant; yet, driver performance while texting was about the same with and without voice-assistant features.¹ In the same vein, AAA research found that all hands-free systems “increased mental distraction to potentially unsafe levels.”²

The good news for Mercedes is that it will be able to collect safety data through the three-month beta program, providing it with concrete results about how safe or unsafe the program was for its drivers.

How companies collect, store, and manage data is always a relevant question with any voice, virtual, or digital assistant technology that can listen, record, and store your conversations over long periods of time. Mercedes will collect, store, and anonymously analyze all user data in the Mercedes-Benz cloud. That means that you should expect that someone will access and review your conversations with Hey Mercedes, even if they can’t identify you or passengers in the conversation.

Mercedes pledges that customers will be informed when their information is collected and for what reason. The automaker has promised that all data collected through the beta testing will be “scrupulously monitored for manipulation and misuse.”

Mercedes-Benz won’t be the only automaker to introduce vehicles with ChatGPT. Following its own partnership with Microsoft in 2021, General Motors has plans to integrate ChatGPT into its vehicles as well. In a 2023 interview with Reuters, GM Vice President Scott Miller said ChatGPT will be in every GM vehicle eventually, although he did not specify a time frame.³ With Walmart, Google, and other multinational corporations investing in autonomous vehicles and machine learning in cars, you can expect more AI vehicle integrations in the years to come.