In-Car Commerce in a Post-COVID World

I will not soon forget the creeping dread instilled by COVID-19.? I felt like something of a refugee returning home from Paris in March 2020 one day before the ban on travel from Europe to the U.S. was set to take hold. Things were about to get way worse.

Businesses were soon shutting down – including car dealerships, restaurants, churches, and schools. The shift to remote work meant reduced traffic volume.? (That reduction in traffic led to an increase in driving misbehavior including speeding and impaired driving resulting in more fatalities and injuries.)

For a brief moment, during which ride hailing and car sharing and rental car operators suffered catastrophic losses of business, the entire automobile sector appeared to be at risk.? Dealerships were shuttered.? Factories were closed.

The existential crisis passed quickly.? Automobile plants re-opened.? Workers on those production lines returned to work – even as their white collar colleagues remained remote.? Most important of all, dealers re-opened their doors.

In time, businesses, schools, churches, and government offices re-opened as well and normal traffic conditions returned.? But some fundamental things had changed – and I don’t just mean people driving alone with masks (still to this day).

The pandemic had ushered in an era of amped up home delivery while introducing the concept of curbside pickup.? Consumers were eventually willing to drive to restaurants or grocery stores, but maybe they preferred to have their order brought out to them.

While home delivery volume may have eased a little bit, curbside pickup at restaurants, pharmacies, and grocery and convenience stores remain with us.? We are back in our cars.? Driving has returned almost to normal, but with a twist, we're looking for more from our cars.

In a post-COVID world the car has become even more of a haven than it was before.? We are back on the road relying on our cars once again, but now the car is even more of a focal point for gathering and sharing information and accessing products and services on-the-fly.

More accommodations have been made for car-centric living with curbside pickup locations virtually ubiquitous at strip malls and destination restaurants and retail stores.? It is in this context that speech recognition in cars is rapidly evolving toward the adoption of generative AI (which emerged post-COVID) along the lines of ChatGPT or automotive equivalents from SoundHound AI, Amazon Alexa, Cerence, Apple, and Google.

Both SoundHound AI and Amazon Alexa have been touting the results of consumer surveys exploring user preferences for in-car connected services.? SoundHound AI’s study was the subject of a three-hour workshop at Reuter’s recent Automotive USA event in Detroit.

SoundHound AI’s study was intended to assess current levels of interest, usage, and satisfaction with existing voice-based solutions including embedded OEM voice assistants and smartphone-based technology.? The objective of the study was to better understand which use cases were most compelling and whether consumers would be willing to pay for such services or barter advertising or sponsored content for access.

Broadly speaking, SoundHound AI found high levels of consumer interest in and acceptance of in-car voice assistants across Europe and the U.S.? The SoundHound AI survey is one of the most detailed pieces of analysis I have ever seen in the industry.

SoundHound AI press releases: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241022883825/en/Research-Finds-79-Of-Drivers-Across-Europe-Would-Use-Voice-Generative-AI-Capabilities-In-Their-Vehicles

https://www.soundhound.com/newsroom/press-releases/soundhound-phone-ordering-crosses-milestone-as-ai-system-processes-100-million-customer-interactions-for-restaurants-across-the-u-s/

At my previous employer we surveyed car owning consumers in China, the U.S., and Europe regarding their interest in and willingness to pay for connected services.? The services that routinely topped the list year-after-year in all three regions were traffic, weather, and parking – TWP.? Without fail.

With the onset of generative AI in homes and offices and, now, cars the scope of voice-assisted search in cars and related connected services has expanded.? SoundHound AI took this expansion into account, breaking down the range of services into three categories: Driving, Productivity, and Entertainment.

SoundHound AI’s study also looked at nine core concepts for familiar tasks and 15 concepts for tasks that might not yet exist.? The three main categories were further broken down as follows:

Driving: Operations Assistant; Value-added Navigation; Vehicle Management

Productivity: Stay in Touch; Get More Done; Food Ordering

Entertainment: Content Curation; Guided Tours; Interactive Games

For better or worse, the SoundHound AI research-based picture of in-car connected services awareness, interest, and usage was completely at odds with my prior experience and understanding. ?Traffic and parking appear nowhere in the survey results and weather is embedded in a category called “staying informed.”? And a category that has been attracting a lot of attention from multiple app developers and infrastructure companies – road tolling – is also completely neglected.

A core challenge for any connected services developer is targeting applications with high frequency of use characteristics – which is why traffic and weather are so essential.? In fact, navigation is worthless if not infused with reliable and predictive traffic information.? For some people, tolling has daily relevance either to be paid or to be avoided.

The one category that both the Amazon Alexa and SoundHound AI studies agree on, though, and is a relatively new post-COVID addition to the list of vehicle-based commerce and connected services is food ordering and pickup from the car.? This is an application that not only has daily relevance it also overlaps tidily with in-vehicle advertising and marketing schemes.

We’ve seen and heard about interactive games in the car and digital owner’s manuals and guided tours and a lot of other peripheral, long-tail kind of stuff.? Ordering food for pickup (included in the study) and toll payments (excluded or missing) are applications with daily relevance that could well serve as the core of an in-vehicle connected services offering.

The SoundHound AI study asks important questions about what we want to do and what we are able to do in and from our cars.? It considers consumers' willingness to pay for the privilege to access these functions and/or tradeoff exposure to advertising for free access.

The more likely scenario is that car makers deploying these services will create the diagnostic tools to rapidly assess which applications are most popular and curate those solutions to better serve users.? Use cases will vary demographically and geographically and consumers will exhibit varying degrees of acceptance and comprehension of voice assistants.? Those voice assistants - infused with generative AI - are here to stay.? Best of all, when deployed optimally, they ought to help us put down our smartphones, drive more safely, and be more productive.