We’re creatures of habit. It’s not a stretch to imagine someone picking up bagels for the office on Tuesdays, trying a new restaurant on the way home from a long Wednesday, and usually taking the scenic route after dropping the kids off at swimming lessons on the weekend. The thought that things would be easier if our vehicles recognized these patterns and helped us out along the way is gaining momentum.
Enter OnStar Go, which General Motors is co-developing with IBM’s Interactive Experience (iX) division. OnStar Go is claimed to be “the auto industry’s first cognitive mobility platform.”
It uses IBM’s Watson AI, which learns driver preferences and then applies machine-learning strategies to sift through data; it finds patterns in habits and decisions within the apps you choose to run. The service is an expansion of the OnStar AtYourService platform, which helps the user find goods and services—and sometimes offers coupons or discounts. But here it taps into Watson Personality Insights and Watson Conversation APIs to study our patterns and make predictions and recommendations about what you may want to do—or should do. For example, the system might remind a parent to pick up diapers based on his or her estimated travel time or provide restaurant recommendations to specific to one’s tastes.
Yes, there’s plenty of potential for this to become awkward. GM spokesman Vijay Iyer assured us, however, that while app providers have access to users’ location-based habits, as well as previous purchases and visits logged on a particular app, there’s no overarching sharing of consumer habits or information among apps.
Currently, the system interfaces with ExxonMobil (to find gas stations and for payments), iHeartRadio (to get personalized entertainment recommendations), and Parkopedia (to help find a spot and pay for it). Watson Retrieve and Rank will notify users when an order is ready at a retail store. All the while, Mastercard, through its Masterpass wallet system, is integrated to let you pay while on the go.
GM says the service will “give millions of GM drivers the ability to connect and interact with their favorite brands.” Which leads us to critical questions about privacy—after all, this functionality is integrated with a uniquely identifiable vehicle that your family ostensibly will use for many years, not a handset that you can replace (or perform a factory reset to).
Each app will ask you to opt in to various levels of sharing and tracking, GM’s Iyer said, but the company also is working on a top-level way to allow users to temporarily turn off in-app tracking and location services, and wallet functionality may always require a PIN or second stage of verification.
OnStar sees its Go functionality and the AtYourService interface as a platform, not an app like Google Now that’s capable of mining what’s done within other apps in the ecosystem. Apps operate independently but with equal (and limited) access to your information—yet it’s still information for which they can leverage Watson to find patterns.
The new services, which extend to app-enabled mobile devices, will be offered beginning in early 2017 in some vehicles, then by the end of the year in more than 2 million GM vehicles with 4G LTE capability.
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