Case Study

Dependable Navigator

 Imagine a new navigational agent for your car: It works anywhere in the world, without the internet.  Reacting fast and intuitively, it anticipates your needs, responds instantly, and communicates clearly.  It knows you’ve been on the road a while, and suggests a place to rest, and good food to eat. As you talk to it more, it learns more and more about you: What you like,  how you speak,   your local dialect.   It’s always available.    It feels present, here, not far,  helpful… Not onerous- Not something foisted upon you by a mega-giant corporation-  Something you want.  

Details

Company Name: Cars Inc.
Date: Jan 2021
Website: www.cars.eng

With the legions of new electric cars coming out, a staid automobile company is looking for a leg up on competition- a way to differentiate their vehicles from the young upstart electric car companies.  What should they do?

Analyzing Our Problem

The car company realized they needed differentiation from the upstart electric car companies, and realized with Brighten Ai, they could leap frog the younger car companies “fat tablet” interior display with some truly advanced technology.

On closer analysis, they were thrilled to learn that zero latency, always available navigation systems would actually save lives on the road.

Decision : Add Brighten Ai’s Navigation agent

Instead of a check box, so-so navigation system that only works when cellular connections are strong, and has distracting (& unsafe) latencies, our intrepid car company turns to Brighten Ai as their primary navigation system.

Traditional voice

  • Long, varying latencies
  • Available only when internet is good
  • Not available in much of USA, rest of world where cell phone towers aren’t plentiful
  • Voice search can’t find many things because databases aren’t up to date, or highly detailed
  • Single FST based language model means weeks-long training times, costly cloud based inference, user audio pumped to cloud.

Brighten AI

  • Zero latency
  • Available always
  • Voice search finds most things because databases are constantly kept up to date, automatically
  • Automobile always has high density databases for nearby places on vehicle, and lower density databases for major cities
  • Multiple trained Brighten language models train in seconds
  • Safer
  • Complete privacy

Ongoing Results

Drivers in this company’s cars learn to depend on instant communication with their navigational agent, both to start a new route, but also, because of zero latency, being able to alter routes at any time, and safely.    

Once on the road, the lower latency driving system shows itself as immediately safer, and people learn to depend on 99.999% availability anywhere in the world.

In deeper analysis, the car company finds that unlike traditional voice navigation customers, their customers have stopped emotionally giving up on talking to their voice agents in frustration waiting for correct responses, and almost completely remove the squint and swerve modality of traditional “agent assisted” driving.

They’ve realized that having an agent actually be available all the time with zero latency translates directly into safer drivers. 

“I needed a cappuccino fast.  I asked my car to take us to the great new coffee shop down the road, and we were there in a jiffy.  

On the way to work, I saw a traffic jam ahead, and got off the road while asking the car to reroute us through Palo Alto, and grabbed fresh produce the way.   I even sent a quick grocery list to Whole Foods while we were on our way there”

Wow!

Changing the game

Brighten Ai’s built in handling of streaming geo-segmented language models meant that the car company could create very high density local language models in the most important metropolitan areas for their automobiles roll out, and then pay sophisticated local information vendors around the globe to flesh out the regional geo data.

Brighten’s instant response and CereProc’s emotionally present voices created new empathetic experiences, creating deeper, more emotional connections to the car company’s products and brand.

As the product rolled out, each customer of the car company had their own customized highly accurate mapping in  their car, customized and configured based on her needs, continually streaming to be up to date, while maintaining much lower data rates than traditional voice nav systems streaming customers private audio to distant, slow cloud voice systems.

 

Car company has the best voice navigational system in the industry

  1. Instantaneous
  2. Always available
  3. Up to date navigational data
  4. Customized for each car based on location 

Core Product offering for Auto

On Device OS: Android, Linux.
Base install: 500mb

Baseline voice nav search:  Customers can search for places and create routes.

Mapping Database support:  Brighten works with automobile company and mapping vendors to connect localized place name lists to Brighten’s language model auto trainer, which starts emitting geo local tiled language models, which are blended into customized models for each car company customer.

Modular Sync system: Agent can plug into auto OS sync system, networking stack.   Current stack is secure AWS push & sync stack. 

Language support

Baseline vocab: Top 10 languages support, & including Chinese, Japanese.
Brighten tooling: to create versioned auto training streaming localized place name language models with mapping vendors

Additional Opportunities

  1. “I need to stop for gas”
  2. “Take us back to the pizza place from last Friday”
  3. Instant route modification by voice, centered on zero latency experiences.
  4. Open mic conversations when the driver is alone
  5. Partnering with CereProc for custom voices
  6. Partnering with XMOS for custom in vehicle microphones for superior experiences.

Companion offering for Auto

On Device OS: Android, iOS.
Base install: 500mb

Companion app for mobile devices:  Extends car companies brand into the home, allows instant conversations with the auto even when the person isn’t in the auto.

As a deal sweetener, the Brighten Ai team helped the company create a mobile app, that created a longer lasting emotional connection to their customers, by extending their cars presence in their customers lives beyond the time when they are in their vehicle.  The mobile app maintained the same agent personality, with the same voice, and industry leading privacy.

The Results

Safer Driving

Engaged customers

Brand differentiation

Actionable market intelligence from voice interactions

 

%

less time getting to destinations

%

Increase IN Sales

%

INCREASE IN customer satisfaction

%

INCREASE IN ACTIONABLE MARKET INTELLIGENCE