Extravehicular speech interface for automotive assistant
AssigneeCerence Operating Company
InventorHolger Quast
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Each vehicle in a fleet has an automotive assistant and an external speech interface. A person who is authorized to interact with an automotive assistant of any vehicle from that fleet is detected as being outside a vehicle from that fleet. After having determined that the person is indeed authorized, an automotive assistant in that vehicle communicates with that person. It does so either by receiving an utterance by that person or by transmitting an utterance to that person.
Claims22
A method comprising
- detecting that a person is outside a vehicle that is a member of a fleet of vehicles, each of said vehicles comprising an infotainment system and an external speech interface, said infotainment system comprising an automotive assistant and an access controller, said external interface comprising at least one of a microphone and a loudspeaker outside of said vehicle,
- using said access controller, determining that said person is authorized to interact with all of said automotive assistants in said fleet, and
- after having determined that said person is authorized, establishing communication between said person and a first automotive assistant, said first automotive assistant being one of said automotive assistants, and
- after having established communication, using said external speech interface of said vehicle for, at least one of
- receiving an utterance by said person and
- transmitting an utterance by said automotive assistant.
An apparatus comprising
- an access controller and an automotive assistant,
- wherein said automotive assistant is one of a plurality of automotive assistants, each of which is a constituent of an infotainment system,
- wherein said access controller is one of a plurality of access controllers, each of which is a constituent of one of said infotainment systems,
- wherein each of said infotainment systems is installed in a corresponding vehicle in a fleet of vehicles,
- wherein said access controller is configured to determine whether a person who is outside of said vehicle is a person who is authorized to interact with said automotive assistant and also with all other automotive assistants in said fleet,
- wherein said access controller is further configured to establish communication between said person and one of said automotive assistants in said fleet after having made said determination by using an external speech interface of said vehicle in which said automotive assistant is installed,
- wherein said external speech interface is one of a plurality of external speech interfaces, each of which is installed in a corresponding one of said vehicles in said fleet of vehicles, and
- wherein said automotive assistant is configured to communicate with any other automotive assistant in said fleet.
A manufacture comprising a tangible and non-transitory computer readable medium having encoded thereon instructions that, when executed by an infotainment system of a vehicle that is a member of a fleet of vehicles, cause execution of an access controller and an automotive assistant on said infotainment system, said access controller being configured to detect that a person outside said vehicle is authorized to interact with automotive assistants in all of said vehicles in said fleet using an external speech interface of said vehicle to either receive an utterance by said person or to transmit an utterance to said person.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.