This Qualcomm-Google partnership may give us the in-car voice assistants we've been waiting for

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past year, it’s that generative AI is playing a pivotal role in technological advancements, including where people spend much of their day — automobiles. Today, Google and Qualcomm have officially partnered to leverage their chips and generative AI capabilities to help developers create more enriched automotive experiences.

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On Tuesday, at the chipmaker’s Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm announced a multi-year collaboration with Google that will utilize both companies’ latest technologies, including Snapdragon Digital Chassis, Android Automotive OS, and Google Cloud, to advance digital transformation in cars and develop generative AI-enabled digital cockpits. 

According to the press release, Google will bring its AI expertise to the collaboration, allowing for the development of intuitive generative AI experiences that anticipate users’ needs, such as more advanced voice assistants and immersive mapping, making driving as a whole more burdenless.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm will supply its Snapdragon heterogeneous edge AI system-on-chips (SoC) and its Qualcomm AI Hub, a platform that developers can use to deploy and manage AI models onto Qualcomm-powered devices to run the experiences and underlying vision, audio, and speech models.

“Our technology collaboration with Google to drive innovation and develop cutting-edge, Gen AI-enabled solutions is a significant milestone in unlocking new possibilities for automakers and Tier-1 suppliers while empowering the industry to create safe and digitally advanced experiences,” said Nakul Duggal, Group GM of Automotive, Industrial and Cloud Computing at Qualcomm. 

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Together, the companies will develop a standardized reference framework for developing generative AI-enabled digital cockpits. The framework will be pre-integrated with the Android Automotive Operating System (AAOS) software, which allows users to have the same familiar experience and access an assistant as they usually would, with a responsive voice user interface, this time optimized by Google AI and Snapdragon SoCs. 

Qualcomm also suggests that “the framework enables Google Cloud-hosted automotive software development to be optimized for Snapdragon platforms, increasing developer productivity while reducing time to market for AAOS platform and services.” If true, these changes should bold well for future automotive experiences. 

Disclosure: The cost of Sabrina Ortiz’s travel to Maui, Hawaii, for the Qualcomm Summit, was covered by Qualcomm, a common industry practice for long-distance trips. The judgments and opinions of ZDNET’s writers and editors are always independent of the companies we cover.