Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open platform for the connected car, announced the launch of two new Expert Groups (EG) focused on speech recognition and vehicle-to-cloud (V2C) connectivity.

"Our goal is to voice-enable every application in the vehicle, but the challenge today is that developers have to manually integrate with each automaker's preferred speech recognition engine," said Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux at The Linux Foundation. "We plan to provide a standard set of open APIs that allows developers to write their application only once, and it will work on any system from any automaker using AGL, regardless of the underlying speech recognition technology. We believe this is the first time such standardization is being implemented in the industry, and this will greatly reduce fragmentation and create an ecosystem of speech-enabled apps for the vehicle."

Led by Amazon Alexa, Nuance Communications, and Voicebox Technologies, the Speech EG will also provide guidance for supporting technologies including natural language, grammar development tools, onboard vs. cloud-based speech, and signal processing for noise reduction and echo cancellation.

"This working group has a tremendous opportunity to move in-car voice technology forward in ways that will delight customers," said John Scumniotales, Director of Products, Amazon Alexa Automotive. "We envision that customers will have a voice service like Alexa with them throughout their day, with continuity between their home and their car. Making it simpler for automakers to implement voice services is a big step toward this vision—we're excited to join this working group and innovate on new ways to improve the voice experience for customers."

AGL has also launched a Vehicle-to-Cloud EG that is exploring use cases such as telematics, personalization, authentication, and authorization. Led by ForgeRock, the V2C EG will be responsible for implementing the reference architecture and services such as IoT protocols for connecting the vehicle to the cloud, connected car features, over-the-air upgrades, remote vehicle interactions, identity management, and location-based services.

"The automotive industry's evolution to a service-driven, smart mobility ecosystem is transforming focus from vehicle unit sales to personalized mobility experiences that will depend on cloud connectivity and a new wave of connected sensor data," said Ashley Stevenson, Identity Technology Director, ForgeRock.

For more information about AGL, go to https://www.automotivelinux.org/.

More information about the Linux Foundation can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.