At January’s CES, Ford Motor Company will showcase a set of voice activated services. According to this post on the SYNC blog, Ford has published an API (Application Programming Interface), called SyncLink, to encourage support of third party applications. Early development efforts focused on the usual suspects, search and control of “audio infotainment (internet music, news and talk show streaming sites) and GPS location-based navigation services”. Hands-free management of messaging (be it text, email or voicemail) cannot be far behind.

Given that Ford turned to local college students to build new services on the API, we would think that voice controlled, mobile, social gaming applications will be ready for demo at CES. Once a platform is opened up to developers, it is difficult to predict with precision where the imagination of the hive mind will take them. Cars are already expressions of personal preferences and status (sort of like one’s wall on Facebook), and we’ve already seen applications emerging (like Waze for the iPhone), that provide a mechanism for wireless subscribers to issue their own, real-time traffic reports, so the notion of voice-activated status updates over SYNC cannot have escaped the collective intelligence of the early developers.

Thankfully, Ford is unlikely to operate its own “app store.” Indications are that applications sold through wireless operator stores will be adapted to work with Sync. The Sync logo will probably lose its “powered by Microsoft” tagline as well, since the Ford’s “exclusive” with Micrsoft has apparently expired. As long as the services are hands-free and eyes-on-the-road, we’re in for some accelerated innovation in mobile speech.

Categories: Articles

Tags: mobile speech, Ford, Recombinant Communications, Sync