The trend of big touchscreens in cars has left many yearning for the not-so-distant days when most user interactions happened with physical buttons. B

Rivian’s chief software officer says in-car buttons are ‘an anomaly’

submited by

Style Pass

2024-10-30 23:30:02

The trend of big touchscreens in cars has left many yearning for the not-so-distant days when most user interactions happened with physical buttons. But Rivian’s chief software officer Wassym Bensaid believes using buttons in a car is an “anomaly.”

“It’s a bug. It’s not a feature,” Bensaid said Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “Ideally, you would want to interact with your car through voice. The problem today is that most voice assistants are just broken.”

To that end, Bensaid said that “every week” he’s driving around an engineering vehicle that has an AI-powered voice assistant, though he did not specify which one. He mentioned earlier in his interview with TechCrunch’s transportation editor Kirsten Korosec that Rivian has “partnerships that I cannot yet talk about.”

“I think the car is actually a fantastic environment for AI,” he said, while noting that latency and hallucinations are still very big problems that need to be solved.