SoundHound Launches AI Pact With EV-Maker Lucid

Voice AI company SoundHound launched a partnership with electric vehicle maker Lucid.

The car company released its hands-free voice assistant, Lucid Assistant, powered by SoundHound’s artificial intelligence, according to a Thursday (Jan. 2) press release.

“Developing Lucid Assistant in cooperation with SoundHound enables us to deliver much more than a voice control feature,” Dr. Jean-Philippe Gauthier, head of software engineering at Lucid, said in the release. “In combination with Lucid’s frequent over-the-air software updates, Lucid Assistant can grow in functionality and capability over time, delivering an ever-better experience for Lucid owners.”

Available now to Lucid Air owners, the assistant responds to the wake words “Hey Lucid” and lets drivers and passengers “ask questions in a natural and conversational way and receive fast, accurate responses through SoundHound’s proprietary technology,” per the release.

“This technology ensures that the assistant selects the correct response from the most appropriate domain — whether that’s an answer powered by generative AI or the kind of response that other large language models may not handle, like real-time questions about weather, sports, stocks, and more,” the release said.

The assistant also lets users access Lucid’s full car manual and can give answers to almost any question about the vehicle’s functionality, while also allowing drivers to use voice to control features such as navigation, according to the release.

SoundHound is hosting a “hands-on experience” with the new assistant at its booth at the upcoming CES show in Las Vegas.

Generative AI allows drivers to have conversations with their connected cars.

It’s now possible “to have a much more conversational interaction with your vehicle compared to previous generations of AI,” Cerence Chief Revenue Officer Christian Mentz told PYMNTS in an interview last year.

One area where generative AI is making a difference is navigation. By integrating language models, navigation systems can be given reasoning and contextual awareness, allowing for improvement in interpreting requests.

For example, Mentz said, a driver can make a complex request like, “I’m hungry for a thin crust pizza,” and the system can interpret it, bringing up route guidance to an Italian restaurant with that variety of pizza on the menu.

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