As I noted a couple of years ago here, Ford Motor Company has long taken a very “open” approach to promoting highly-personalized, voice-enabled applications in their automobiles. John Ellis, the auto maker’s Global Technologist for Connected Services and Solution, summed it up nicely by saying “Before there was Siri, there was SYNC,” referring to the “hands-free,” voice-activated on-board command-and-control system that Ford first introduced in 2007.

Ellis has been instrumental in developing and promoting Ford’s efforts to leverage both SYNC and its close sibling, SYNC Applink, as the mechanisms for individual drivers to use their favorite smartphone apps – hands-free and eyes-forward – through SYNC. Today, the list of featured apps includes Pandora, Stitcher, IHeartRadio, NPR News; but, through the Applink Developer Program, Ellis expects the list to continue to grow, thanks to development and marketing efforts by Ford and its partners.

Ford maintains its business model, which is to “sell more cars.” It is using SYNC as a differentiator for global initiatives to accomplish its sales goals by playing up how people can use their voice to personalize their in-car experience. In addition to encouraging more mobile app developers to make their wares compatible with SYNC, it has already made voice command work seamlessly in nine languages with emergency assistance in 34 languages.

The other initiatives that are of great importance is to strike a balance between the capabilities that are “embedded” in the car and resources that are in the cloud so that the services meet every driver’s requirement for reliability – regardless of location, velocity of travel or other circumstances. Whether it’s “brought-in” or “beamed in” it has to work every time.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Ford, Sync, voice command, mobile speech