Sean McLain reports in the Wall Street Journal:
Toyota imagines Yui being treated like a friend or family member, with whom access to social-media accounts is shared. It wants to monitor your social-media posts to know if you are obsessed with a particular band or sports team. It also wants to monitor the news, so it has potential context when you look happy or sad.With data about your habits, likes and dislikes, the car can make educated guesses about what you are doing. One issue is the amount of personal information required and how secure they are.
If you love your car, Toyota Motor Corp. TM +0.58% thinks your car should love you back.
That’s the reasoning behind the company’s artificial-intelligence project, dubbed Yui: an onboard virtual assistant that gauges your mood, indulges in personal chitchat and offers to drive if it senses you are sleepy or distracted.
In one Toyota video, shown at the Tokyo Motor Show, a woman sits on a seaside cliff, talking about her father with her car.
“He sounds like a great father,” says Yui, in a baritone male voice.
“You’re a bit like him,” the woman says.
Until now, Toyota, the world’s second-largest car maker by vehicle sales, has kept relatively quiet about autonomous vehicles and how it plans to deal with challenges from Silicon Valley upstarts, such as Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo LLC and others. “We think this is a good way to do it,” said Didier Leroy, who oversees Toyota’s business planning and operations.
Toyota isn’t the only manufacturer that thinks your car should talk to you. Japanese rival Honda Motor Co. as well as tech companies Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. are working on their own in-vehicle AI assistants.
Honda is also using the motor show to demonstrate a concept vehicle equipped with an AI system, dubbed Hana, that can read driver emotions and stress levels.
“If people think about AI, sometimes people are afraid of it, because it is super intelligent,” said a Honda spokeswoman. “We don’t want to make a type of Terminator,” she said, in reference to the time-traveling robot assassin played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1984 movie “The Terminator.”
To be sure, rarely do futuristic vehicles at auto shows make it to the roads. But Toyota plans to start testing a car equipped with Yui on Japanese roads in 2020.
In autonomous-driving mode, the seats recline and massage your back in a manner Toyota says will slow your breathing and calm you down.
“I thought it was neat. I’ve never spoken to a car,” said Minami Yuuki, a 20-year-old college student, after sitting through a driver-seat demonstration of Yui. “The back massage was nice.”
Yui was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. At the Tokyo event, Yui was demonstrated in a number of concept vehicles, showing how the system can work in different cars.
One potential issue is the amount of personal information such systems require and how secure they are.
Toyota imagines Yui being treated like a friend or family member, with whom access to social-media accounts is shared.It wants to monitor your social-media posts to know if you are obsessed with a particular band or sports team. It also wants to monitor the news, so it has potential context when you look happy or sad. Did your favorite team drop out of the playoffs? Did your favorite singer come out with a new song?
With a mountain of data about your habits, likes and dislikes, the car can make educated guesses about what you are doing, says Toyota.
Yui reflects how culture can affect the approach car makers take toward the future of vehicles.
“Japanese people, in particular, would want a car with artificial intelligence, because we have a bunch of popular characters from our childhood, like ‘Astro Boy’ and other robots,” said Manabu Takahashi, a 56-year-old website designer, who attended the motor show. Still, giving a machine access to a bunch of personal information could be a hurdle to adoption, he said. “It’s very useful, but scary,” Mr. Takahashi said.
Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk calls AI a potential threat to human existence, echoing a popular Hollywood trope.
Not all car makers see people wanting a humanlike relationship with their cars.
“I’m not sure we’re going in that direction,” said Takao Asami, who oversees research at Nissan Motor Co. and its alliance partner, Renault SA .
Nissan is developing a system that uses a form of AI to help analyze sensor data, identifying cars and other obstacles.
Indeed, some people at the motor show seemed less than enthusiastic about a car that always listens and records people’s speech.
“I’d rather not have this, because I’m a private person,” said Yasuko Takahashi, a 54-year-old office worker and wife of “Astro Boy” fan Manabu Takahashi.
“I’d rather have the cars talk to each other, instead of me,” she said.
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