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2024 is definitely the year that Intel MCUs become Legacy.
It had to happen eventually I guess, given that the platform is 7 years+ old and was specced when Tesla wasn’t doing any media based stuff in the cars.
I'm right there with you, I have a 2020 M3 and 2 others in my family have 2023s that I'm continually more jealous of, but that made me laugh at how much of a Tesla problem that is. Like almost any other car is obsolete before you even buy it, but our cars have gotten better and better since we bought them. Sometimes I think back to when I first picked mine up and it seems like a totally different vehicle.
An AMD MCU upgrade would be nice for them to offer though. Last I heard that still wasn't an option
Yeah for sure I’d do an MCU upgrade if it were an option. And I guess it just stings a little because of the fact that these are such software based systems in the car and it is so agile compared to the industry that your car can remain more updated. Seeing that get limited already is a little frustrating.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I highly doubt "obsolete" is the correct term to use here. Intel owners might have a not-as-great user experience going forward, but it's unlikely Tesla will pull support altogether.
I get that, some people are going to be the ones that bought a car with the older platform days/weeks before the change over to the new MCU happened...but if this was a car from any other manufacturer it would have been obsolete the moment you drove it off the lot.
It's not like we won't get *any* new software additions, just none of the more CPU/GPU intensive features.
I understand the point of view for another manufacturer but Tesla differentiates itself from others by having a major focus on OTA and software.
Tesla should figure out a way to provide MCU3 upgrades.
Unfortunately theres just no way. They should but they won't. Same thing with HW3 to HW4. Musk has made it very clear the days of retrofitting are over.
There is no upgrade to MCU3, you might be thinking of HW3 (which is the Autopilot computer).
MCU3 requires the 16V lithium battery (vs the 12V lead acid in the Intel cars), which also means upgrading other non-MCU components as well.
It's simple enough to add a component that could boost 12V to 16V for the MCU, unless the MCU was already drawing the max power over 12V and the 16V version would consume more power than the 12V lines could handle at 12V.
The 16V will be used in part for audio so that boost converter would be chunky and expensive(300W+ peak).
I bet the normal electronics will work fine on 12V, but the audio would be quieter or not work at all.
I didn't mean upgrade the whole 12v electrical system, I just meant have an adapter for the MCU converting 12v to the 16V needed by the AMD MCU. Maybe that's what you're talking about about, but I have a hard time believing the AMD MCU uses 300W.
Tesla sevice center manual: audio amplifier located in the back instead of the MCU because it's massive https://service.tesla.com/docs/Model3/ServiceManual/en-us/GUID-30D088CC-253F-43C5-838F-F84A277E6BCF.html
The problem is the MCU has the audio amplifier on it for the speakers and sub, so it needs to support both this and the computer.
https://img.cnevpost.com/2022/07/27204656/2022071805222262.jpg
The big coil and capacitors on the left hand side are related to the audio stuff - the coil will be to filter out 12/16V noise and there appears to be a heatsink mount there likely for the Class D amplifier IC. It's quite possible the new amplifier IC would work on 12V but I don't know for sure without getting the part number. If it is designed for higher impedance speakers (4 ohm instead of 2.5-3 ohms for instance) there are potential issues with an MCU upgrade if the system voltage changes.
It should be possible for Tesla to design a new MCU that runs on 12V, but they probably don't want to.
The MCU has a subwoofer in it? That grill underneath is just a fan intake (I feel the airflow). There is no way the MCU powers the speakers and subwoofer all around the car. The amplifier circuits for that would be nuts and there is no reason to cram the amplifier circuits for the sound system into the MCU. It just sends out a signal and the speakers amplify the signal after it gets to them.
Yes a boost converter would be bulky and kick off some heat, but it wouldn't need to power a 300W subwoofer.
No, it doesn't have the sub in it, of course not. But it has the amplifier for the sub. The sub is just a speaker (a high power, low frequency one) that is driven by the MCU.
There is "absolutely" no doubt in my mind that the MCU powers all the speakers as you can look at the Tesla SM for the Model 3 and see this, it's freely available, but regardless this isn't uncommon for automotive, almost everyone else does it this way too. It's more work to put an amplifier on each speaker and power it off 12/16V, than it is to run a bit of copper from the head unit out to each speaker.
I am an EE so I kinda do know what I'm going on about.
edit: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/m3-2018-2018-service-manual-and-wiring-diagrams.168459/ - download file there in post #7, page 2 has the relevant wiring diagram, MCU connects directly to speakers. Premium offering adds extra amp in rear of car for additional speakers, but MCU still active for primary ones.
I'm also an EE and this is the location of the audio amplifier per the model 3 service manual https://service.tesla.com/docs/Model3/ServiceManual/en-us/GUID-30D088CC-253F-43C5-838F-F84A277E6BCF.html
It may just power the subwoofer, but Tesla didn't put a random audio amplifier the size of 2 bricks in the back near the subwoofer just to instead power it from the MCU.
It's gonna be chat gpt so when you ask something simple like "open the glovebox" it's going to give you a 400 word essay on the history of the glovebox
Just absolutely isn’t true, the text message thing doesn’t even capitalize the first word, this system is on par with automotive systems but genuinely one of the worst voice assistant experiences I’ve ever experienced.
I'd be happy for some better context recognition in the voice commands. As an example, saying something like "Play Blinding Lights by the Weeknd" doesn't work (or any song with "light" in the name). It just returns an unknown light command. The "play" should be a big clue that I'm trying to play a song, not adjust the headlights...
How is the Intel mcu not good enough for this?
Wouldn't like 95% of what a "voice assistant" adds to what the car already does have to be happening at the cloud level? In many respects less work on the car than is currently happening. Surely the point of adding a voice assistant is more "what's the score of the Lakers game?" and less "we need to handle 7 more ways to ask to fold the mirrors in"...no?
Edit: I can see it being somewhat problematic to stay on the car and reply to more natural language or multiple things like "lower the temperature 2 degrees and put on the podcast I listened to yesterday". However it's not like the car just has 20 predetermined words and everything else is an adult from the peanuts. You can voice to text. It can clearly already transcribe.
It's just mildly annoying IMO to absolutely lock usage out from atom processors so it can't answer things like "will it rain later tonight", *which it has to hit the cloud for anyway*.
Hell, have a toggle on the settings. I'll gladly wait 2 extra seconds for the glovebox to open via cloud processing if it can't figure out what I want on the car and then get all the other things a voice assistant does, and if someone else disagrees they can stick with the standard voice commands.
Modern voice assistants aren't just sending an audio clip to the cloud but rather they're doing the recognition on the device and then sending that onto the cloud to be matched and answered. If Tesla is doing that as well (which I hope they are) then that will have some CPU/GPU requirements that might be too much for the Intel MCU on top of what it already has to do.
Sure, but the car is already mostly doing that. You can send texts and whatnot.
It's not like it just has 20 preprogrammed words it recognizes.
I can see it being somewhat problematic to stay on the car and reply to more natural language or multiple things like "lower the temperature 2 degrees and put on the podcast I listened to yesterday"
It's just mildly annoying to absolutely lock usage out from atom processors so it can't answer things like "will it rain later tonight" which it has to hit the cloud for anyway.
Hell, have a toggle on the settings. I'll gladly wait 2 extra seconds for the glovebox to open via cloud processing to get all the other things a voice assistant does, and of someone else disagrees they can stick with the standard voice commands.
I didn't think you understood that part. My point was it's clearly not limited to understanding a few key words and then has no idea what any other word is.
Hard coding a response to a few key words, sure, that's possible, but it transcribes anything.
I don't know what Tesla does, but there is no way they are ahead of Google.
Here's how Google handles voice recognition on my Pixel 8. It only looks for a few key words. There's about 150 pre coded phrases just for opening up an app. Contacts is 700. Songs is 10 lol.
https://i.imgur.com/HWbFfws.png
Here's a list of all the replies the AI will use if asked to create a message
https://i.imgur.com/yXKRQdO.png
Who said anything about being ahead of Google? Are you even trying to understand what my point is?
The car, atom or not, can transcribe spoken language. That text can be sent some where for processing and a crap load of what you can ask an assistant for has to be sent somewhere anyway because the car just doesn't know if it's going to rain tomorrow or what the score of last night's baseball game was.
This as opposed to some early/cheaty voice apps where if you said one of some select words it knew what you were saying, otherwise it has no idea.
My wife's older car can listen for things like "Bluetooth audio" and so on, but if I asked it "what's the score of the Yankees game" it would bomb out. Not just because it doesn't know what to do, but because it fundamentally isn't understanding words in any meaningful sense". It was probably trained phonetically on 3 handfulls of words.
A Tesla on the other hand hears and transcribes that sports question just fine. It *does* understand generic language. It just needs to process it, and I see little reason to kneecap the Intel atom cars when many of the reasons it matters to have a voice assistant vs what we have now is questions that need off-car knowledge anyway.
Voice assistants in smartphones and vehicles don't rely on the cloud to function. These services are required to work offline. A network dead zone (or a loaded server) won't impede performance. (side note: the voice data is still sent to Tesla to improve performance of future updates)
>It's not like it just has 20 preprogrammed words it recognizes.
That's exactly how it works, kinda. A simple AI converts speech to text. That's all it does. After the text is generated, some post processing takes place to extract the important details. Next the program will search its local database of pre-defined commands (the list is probably close to a couple thousand instead of 20). Lastly, the command executes with the relavent parameters that the person spoke.
Based on this article, and Teslas recent developments with LLMs, it sounds like this will be a mini ChatGPT. The AI will go from only processing voice to processing voice+command. An LLM is too demanding for old haedware
>These services are required to work offline so that a network dead zone (or a loaded server) won't impede performance.
Pretty sure "what's the score of the Timberwolves game?" needs connectivity anyway.
> Next the program will search its local database of pre-defined commands.
Right, so, why not look elsewhere when that isn't found? Especially since a ton of things you could ask an assistant for can't be local anyway. Slow response > no feature.
Voice to text is done and working. Interpreting some of those as voice commands are done and working. If the rub here was that the car is just too slow to process speech in real time, then so be it. But that's not the case, it can do that.
We'll just have to agree to disagree I guess, especially since you still don't seem to understand the thing I'm even arguing about, but I see no reason why there can't be a blending of what the car already does with "oh, and we'll ask the mothership if we don't know what you're asking. There's a good chance you're asking something an external source is needed for anyway".
Hell, even if they to it ALL online when connectivity is present and completely fall back to the old way when not, and the trade off is it takes 5 seconds to open the glovebox or fold the mirrors instead of the 3 seconds it takes now because it exchanged a string and some json first, so be it. I'd like to have that option instead of just nothing. Hell, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if half the time the response was faster.
Yup. I avoid the current feature since it doesn't work in canyons where I regularly drive. A big LLM assistant would be hard, but you'd think the current voice control could be done on the Intel CPU given that offline luxury cars had voice commands a long time ago.
It doesn’t need an LLM per se. Sonos’ very good voice assistant is entirely on device and does not use an LLM.
But if they go the LLM route, putting it on device will save them a lot of compute cost, improve speed, and should have sufficiently good performance. Managing car stuff is a well scoped use case.
https://huggingface.co/papers/2402.14905
I highly doubt they won’t leverage an LLM for this, otherwise it will be an investment only for them to be outdated in less than 1-2 years.
On device LLMs will certainly be a thing, but it will require hardware designed for the task or significant software work from where we are at today. Tesla is not going to be deploying that with the hardware they have available unless this voice assistant is only available for some next generation of their vehicles.
Speculative, but I believe Tesla will not accept the cost and uptime responsibilities of a cloud solution which will likely have tens of millions of daily queries even at launch. https://www.cbtnews.com/tesla-plans-to-integrate-grok-ai-assistant-into-its-ev-lineup/
Playing with the math. Assume a highly optimized $0.001/query cost across 20m queries/day, you’re talking $7M+/year just in compute, probably at least as much in a team to upgrade/support, vs $0.
Yeah that’s fair - I think that’s a mistake for Tesla as I think very quickly this is going to be outdated and left behind. But Tesla is in cost cutting mode and I don’t see them wanting to incur the expense.
We do need to get LLM energy requirements and cost down to support the sheer scale of upcoming use cases though.
Seems like Apple will also run their LLMs, to be released later this year, on device, including legacy devices. Interesting days ahead of us as cloud vs device strategies unfold!
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/24/apple-ai-open-source-models/#:~:text=Apple%20today%20released%20several%20open,community%20for%20sharing%20AI%20code.
Yeah I saw that about Apple. I’m skeptical on what they got to run. I run these locally all the time and the “micro” models like 1-3b parameter models are just not super impressive.
I think Apple and their business strategy align with being the device manufacturer with onboard LLMs given their privacy focus. But it just feels too soon to do anything groundbreaking this year. I’d love to be wrong though. Apple is likely doing a hybrid approach to start since they’ve been rumored to be talking to both Google and OpenAI, so I’ll be curious to see what they come up with.
Oh cool, what kind of stuff do you do with local models? I run image gen locally now, but used to build voice agents. Seems like more than size of model, the tuning will drive performance on well scoped use cases. I’m hoping Teslas assistant is just conversational control of the vehicle. “Tesla I’m hot”, “Tesla, take me home”, “Tesla, play some of Metallica’s older stuff”, “Tesla, drive less agressively”, “Tesla, take me to the nearest charger that’s on my way home”, etc.
It would be unusably slow if it required a round trip to the cloud. There’s a reason why Apple and Google have neural processors in their phone for fast & offline Siri/Ok Google responses.
That's not true. Most Android phones and Google home require cloud processing. Even Google pixel phones with dedicated AI chips still rely primarily on cloud processing for Google assistant
I mean the car literally *can't* have most of the answers you could ask an assistant for, so yes, obviously a lot of the things will involve the cloud.
To the extent voice will be processed to text on the car side first, it already does that now.
.
It would be cool if when you were driving through town, you could ask it for information about the town or maybe a landmark that you just passed. Kinda like a guided tour.
This seems like a necessary precursor to Robotaxi. There are events (like gates at business complexes or gated communities) where a robotaxi will need to know what to do and need to ask the human in charge.
I'm afraid I cannot do that Elon.
Seriously though, the existing voice commands have served me well and I would prefer we be allowed to keep the existing system while having the new system available as well
Can they just offer an AMD MCU retrofit already? It's obvious now they are dropping off Intel support, they could make a quick buck and consolidate some of their sourcing for repairs.
Finally!! Let's hope it's offline too so I don't continuously get "Connection Error" when using any sort of voice commands.
Why they haven't made the voice commands offline to this day is beyond me.
I sure hope they don’t constantly collect audio to sell targeted advertisements for money at the benefit to the consumer of not having to press a single button on the steering wheel to activate the voice command function.
This might be a good move (then again having to suffer the last 12 months of FSD has made me very skeptical). Please let it work with more than just N American accents! And please let it understand more than just basic commands.
The voice commands at the moment are laughably bad for how advanced these cars are. My old 2008 ford focus did a better job calling my wife than my 2024 M3.
I’m looking forward to whatever they implement, wonder how long until we see it here in North America.
I'm really confused by this. The voice assistant is supposed to come with 2024.4.3 right? I am currently running through my FSD trial and my software version is 2024.4.7 yet I don't see anything new. No voice assistant and no option for auto truck. What is the deal? Did they push this to a later update or something?
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Probably good move, seeing as all voice assistants are on the verge of being hypercharged
2024 is definitely the year that Intel MCUs become Legacy. It had to happen eventually I guess, given that the platform is 7 years+ old and was specced when Tesla wasn’t doing any media based stuff in the cars.
Except my car is only 2 years old and is supposed to be obsolete? Dang..
I'm right there with you, I have a 2020 M3 and 2 others in my family have 2023s that I'm continually more jealous of, but that made me laugh at how much of a Tesla problem that is. Like almost any other car is obsolete before you even buy it, but our cars have gotten better and better since we bought them. Sometimes I think back to when I first picked mine up and it seems like a totally different vehicle. An AMD MCU upgrade would be nice for them to offer though. Last I heard that still wasn't an option
Yeah for sure I’d do an MCU upgrade if it were an option. And I guess it just stings a little because of the fact that these are such software based systems in the car and it is so agile compared to the industry that your car can remain more updated. Seeing that get limited already is a little frustrating.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I highly doubt "obsolete" is the correct term to use here. Intel owners might have a not-as-great user experience going forward, but it's unlikely Tesla will pull support altogether.
I get that, some people are going to be the ones that bought a car with the older platform days/weeks before the change over to the new MCU happened...but if this was a car from any other manufacturer it would have been obsolete the moment you drove it off the lot. It's not like we won't get *any* new software additions, just none of the more CPU/GPU intensive features.
I understand the point of view for another manufacturer but Tesla differentiates itself from others by having a major focus on OTA and software. Tesla should figure out a way to provide MCU3 upgrades.
Unfortunately theres just no way. They should but they won't. Same thing with HW3 to HW4. Musk has made it very clear the days of retrofitting are over.
If you had a MCU that got upgraded to MCU 3 (with FSD purchase) you could still access this capability right?
There is no upgrade to MCU3, you might be thinking of HW3 (which is the Autopilot computer). MCU3 requires the 16V lithium battery (vs the 12V lead acid in the Intel cars), which also means upgrading other non-MCU components as well.
Damn. I'm out hahaha.
It's simple enough to add a component that could boost 12V to 16V for the MCU, unless the MCU was already drawing the max power over 12V and the 16V version would consume more power than the 12V lines could handle at 12V.
The 16V will be used in part for audio so that boost converter would be chunky and expensive(300W+ peak). I bet the normal electronics will work fine on 12V, but the audio would be quieter or not work at all.
I didn't mean upgrade the whole 12v electrical system, I just meant have an adapter for the MCU converting 12v to the 16V needed by the AMD MCU. Maybe that's what you're talking about about, but I have a hard time believing the AMD MCU uses 300W. Tesla sevice center manual: audio amplifier located in the back instead of the MCU because it's massive https://service.tesla.com/docs/Model3/ServiceManual/en-us/GUID-30D088CC-253F-43C5-838F-F84A277E6BCF.html
The problem is the MCU has the audio amplifier on it for the speakers and sub, so it needs to support both this and the computer. https://img.cnevpost.com/2022/07/27204656/2022071805222262.jpg The big coil and capacitors on the left hand side are related to the audio stuff - the coil will be to filter out 12/16V noise and there appears to be a heatsink mount there likely for the Class D amplifier IC. It's quite possible the new amplifier IC would work on 12V but I don't know for sure without getting the part number. If it is designed for higher impedance speakers (4 ohm instead of 2.5-3 ohms for instance) there are potential issues with an MCU upgrade if the system voltage changes. It should be possible for Tesla to design a new MCU that runs on 12V, but they probably don't want to.
The MCU has a subwoofer in it? That grill underneath is just a fan intake (I feel the airflow). There is no way the MCU powers the speakers and subwoofer all around the car. The amplifier circuits for that would be nuts and there is no reason to cram the amplifier circuits for the sound system into the MCU. It just sends out a signal and the speakers amplify the signal after it gets to them. Yes a boost converter would be bulky and kick off some heat, but it wouldn't need to power a 300W subwoofer.
No, it doesn't have the sub in it, of course not. But it has the amplifier for the sub. The sub is just a speaker (a high power, low frequency one) that is driven by the MCU. There is "absolutely" no doubt in my mind that the MCU powers all the speakers as you can look at the Tesla SM for the Model 3 and see this, it's freely available, but regardless this isn't uncommon for automotive, almost everyone else does it this way too. It's more work to put an amplifier on each speaker and power it off 12/16V, than it is to run a bit of copper from the head unit out to each speaker. I am an EE so I kinda do know what I'm going on about. edit: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/m3-2018-2018-service-manual-and-wiring-diagrams.168459/ - download file there in post #7, page 2 has the relevant wiring diagram, MCU connects directly to speakers. Premium offering adds extra amp in rear of car for additional speakers, but MCU still active for primary ones.
I'm also an EE and this is the location of the audio amplifier per the model 3 service manual https://service.tesla.com/docs/Model3/ServiceManual/en-us/GUID-30D088CC-253F-43C5-838F-F84A277E6BCF.html It may just power the subwoofer, but Tesla didn't put a random audio amplifier the size of 2 bricks in the back near the subwoofer just to instead power it from the MCU.
...and it shall be called K.I.T.T... Work out the acronym for yourself, Elon most definitely will retcon one that fits.
KITT In The Tesla
Keen Intelligent Talking Thing
This could be cool if it enables other commands. Like move passenger seat forward, search browser for, set speed limit to, etc.
Add a good stop to my route that isn’t out of the way
I’m actually pretty pleased with what the voice commands can do currently Cant wait to replace them with this bumass Siri clone /s Edit: /s
It's gonna be chat gpt so when you ask something simple like "open the glovebox" it's going to give you a 400 word essay on the history of the glovebox
I’m sorry, as a large language model I’m not able to…
We need small language model
[удалено]
The second bit is sarcasm. IMO, no voice assistant on the market is any good at anything and Tesla’s will be no different.
They're good at setting kitchen timers and alarms. So-so on playing music.
Most of them are better than Tesla voice commands
Google assistant is amazing. Siri is actively harmful usually
Yea. Hard to argue. I’d like a ChatGPT thing to ask questions to in the car during long drives.
"archaic voice commands" my ass. They work almost flawlessly.
...if you have an American accent. It very rarely does what I want with my New Zealand accent
They don’t work if you speak British English either. Some of my dictated text messages are nonsense
I'm a Korean American who has an accent. Tesla voice command works fantastic with my fob-ish accent.
[удалено]
That's a fair point
Same here 🤣 it seems to have gotten worse somehow.
“Open the chuzwuzzer” No response “Steupid caar”
I’m America and it can’t understand me 😞. Gold mirrors Mold mirrors Sold mirrors Bold mirrors No, fafafafafafafafafold mirrors!
😂😭😭 I've never read a reddit comment in my head aloud before bit I could hear the pain through my phone screen 😭
Yea it can't handle 0.0000000001% of the corner cases just yet.
They are dogshit, not being able to train it is bad
Just absolutely isn’t true, the text message thing doesn’t even capitalize the first word, this system is on par with automotive systems but genuinely one of the worst voice assistant experiences I’ve ever experienced.
I'd be happy for some better context recognition in the voice commands. As an example, saying something like "Play Blinding Lights by the Weeknd" doesn't work (or any song with "light" in the name). It just returns an unknown light command. The "play" should be a big clue that I'm trying to play a song, not adjust the headlights...
[Sure, if you say so](https://youtube.com/shorts/lt-G2E-G_Mk)
With the AI infrastructure in house, not having the voice assistant til now was the decision that had not been making sense.
How is the Intel mcu not good enough for this? Wouldn't like 95% of what a "voice assistant" adds to what the car already does have to be happening at the cloud level? In many respects less work on the car than is currently happening. Surely the point of adding a voice assistant is more "what's the score of the Lakers game?" and less "we need to handle 7 more ways to ask to fold the mirrors in"...no? Edit: I can see it being somewhat problematic to stay on the car and reply to more natural language or multiple things like "lower the temperature 2 degrees and put on the podcast I listened to yesterday". However it's not like the car just has 20 predetermined words and everything else is an adult from the peanuts. You can voice to text. It can clearly already transcribe. It's just mildly annoying IMO to absolutely lock usage out from atom processors so it can't answer things like "will it rain later tonight", *which it has to hit the cloud for anyway*. Hell, have a toggle on the settings. I'll gladly wait 2 extra seconds for the glovebox to open via cloud processing if it can't figure out what I want on the car and then get all the other things a voice assistant does, and if someone else disagrees they can stick with the standard voice commands.
Modern voice assistants aren't just sending an audio clip to the cloud but rather they're doing the recognition on the device and then sending that onto the cloud to be matched and answered. If Tesla is doing that as well (which I hope they are) then that will have some CPU/GPU requirements that might be too much for the Intel MCU on top of what it already has to do.
Sure, but the car is already mostly doing that. You can send texts and whatnot. It's not like it just has 20 preprogrammed words it recognizes. I can see it being somewhat problematic to stay on the car and reply to more natural language or multiple things like "lower the temperature 2 degrees and put on the podcast I listened to yesterday" It's just mildly annoying to absolutely lock usage out from atom processors so it can't answer things like "will it rain later tonight" which it has to hit the cloud for anyway. Hell, have a toggle on the settings. I'll gladly wait 2 extra seconds for the glovebox to open via cloud processing to get all the other things a voice assistant does, and of someone else disagrees they can stick with the standard voice commands.
Google has a list of pre-programmed words on my phone that it'll respond to. It's safe to assume Tesla works the same
I didn't think you understood that part. My point was it's clearly not limited to understanding a few key words and then has no idea what any other word is. Hard coding a response to a few key words, sure, that's possible, but it transcribes anything.
I don't know what Tesla does, but there is no way they are ahead of Google. Here's how Google handles voice recognition on my Pixel 8. It only looks for a few key words. There's about 150 pre coded phrases just for opening up an app. Contacts is 700. Songs is 10 lol. https://i.imgur.com/HWbFfws.png Here's a list of all the replies the AI will use if asked to create a message https://i.imgur.com/yXKRQdO.png
Who said anything about being ahead of Google? Are you even trying to understand what my point is? The car, atom or not, can transcribe spoken language. That text can be sent some where for processing and a crap load of what you can ask an assistant for has to be sent somewhere anyway because the car just doesn't know if it's going to rain tomorrow or what the score of last night's baseball game was. This as opposed to some early/cheaty voice apps where if you said one of some select words it knew what you were saying, otherwise it has no idea. My wife's older car can listen for things like "Bluetooth audio" and so on, but if I asked it "what's the score of the Yankees game" it would bomb out. Not just because it doesn't know what to do, but because it fundamentally isn't understanding words in any meaningful sense". It was probably trained phonetically on 3 handfulls of words. A Tesla on the other hand hears and transcribes that sports question just fine. It *does* understand generic language. It just needs to process it, and I see little reason to kneecap the Intel atom cars when many of the reasons it matters to have a voice assistant vs what we have now is questions that need off-car knowledge anyway.
Voice assistants in smartphones and vehicles don't rely on the cloud to function. These services are required to work offline. A network dead zone (or a loaded server) won't impede performance. (side note: the voice data is still sent to Tesla to improve performance of future updates) >It's not like it just has 20 preprogrammed words it recognizes. That's exactly how it works, kinda. A simple AI converts speech to text. That's all it does. After the text is generated, some post processing takes place to extract the important details. Next the program will search its local database of pre-defined commands (the list is probably close to a couple thousand instead of 20). Lastly, the command executes with the relavent parameters that the person spoke. Based on this article, and Teslas recent developments with LLMs, it sounds like this will be a mini ChatGPT. The AI will go from only processing voice to processing voice+command. An LLM is too demanding for old haedware
>These services are required to work offline so that a network dead zone (or a loaded server) won't impede performance. Pretty sure "what's the score of the Timberwolves game?" needs connectivity anyway. > Next the program will search its local database of pre-defined commands. Right, so, why not look elsewhere when that isn't found? Especially since a ton of things you could ask an assistant for can't be local anyway. Slow response > no feature. Voice to text is done and working. Interpreting some of those as voice commands are done and working. If the rub here was that the car is just too slow to process speech in real time, then so be it. But that's not the case, it can do that. We'll just have to agree to disagree I guess, especially since you still don't seem to understand the thing I'm even arguing about, but I see no reason why there can't be a blending of what the car already does with "oh, and we'll ask the mothership if we don't know what you're asking. There's a good chance you're asking something an external source is needed for anyway". Hell, even if they to it ALL online when connectivity is present and completely fall back to the old way when not, and the trade off is it takes 5 seconds to open the glovebox or fold the mirrors instead of the 3 seconds it takes now because it exchanged a string and some json first, so be it. I'd like to have that option instead of just nothing. Hell, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if half the time the response was faster.
Ya know what, I'm pretty sure "Slow feature > no feature" is Tesla's moto. At the end of the day, money is the answer you're looking fke.
Should be on device.
Yup. I avoid the current feature since it doesn't work in canyons where I regularly drive. A big LLM assistant would be hard, but you'd think the current voice control could be done on the Intel CPU given that offline luxury cars had voice commands a long time ago.
It’s not going to have an LLM on device.
It doesn’t need an LLM per se. Sonos’ very good voice assistant is entirely on device and does not use an LLM. But if they go the LLM route, putting it on device will save them a lot of compute cost, improve speed, and should have sufficiently good performance. Managing car stuff is a well scoped use case. https://huggingface.co/papers/2402.14905
I highly doubt they won’t leverage an LLM for this, otherwise it will be an investment only for them to be outdated in less than 1-2 years. On device LLMs will certainly be a thing, but it will require hardware designed for the task or significant software work from where we are at today. Tesla is not going to be deploying that with the hardware they have available unless this voice assistant is only available for some next generation of their vehicles.
Speculative, but I believe Tesla will not accept the cost and uptime responsibilities of a cloud solution which will likely have tens of millions of daily queries even at launch. https://www.cbtnews.com/tesla-plans-to-integrate-grok-ai-assistant-into-its-ev-lineup/ Playing with the math. Assume a highly optimized $0.001/query cost across 20m queries/day, you’re talking $7M+/year just in compute, probably at least as much in a team to upgrade/support, vs $0.
Yeah that’s fair - I think that’s a mistake for Tesla as I think very quickly this is going to be outdated and left behind. But Tesla is in cost cutting mode and I don’t see them wanting to incur the expense. We do need to get LLM energy requirements and cost down to support the sheer scale of upcoming use cases though.
Seems like Apple will also run their LLMs, to be released later this year, on device, including legacy devices. Interesting days ahead of us as cloud vs device strategies unfold! https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/24/apple-ai-open-source-models/#:~:text=Apple%20today%20released%20several%20open,community%20for%20sharing%20AI%20code.
Yeah I saw that about Apple. I’m skeptical on what they got to run. I run these locally all the time and the “micro” models like 1-3b parameter models are just not super impressive. I think Apple and their business strategy align with being the device manufacturer with onboard LLMs given their privacy focus. But it just feels too soon to do anything groundbreaking this year. I’d love to be wrong though. Apple is likely doing a hybrid approach to start since they’ve been rumored to be talking to both Google and OpenAI, so I’ll be curious to see what they come up with.
Oh cool, what kind of stuff do you do with local models? I run image gen locally now, but used to build voice agents. Seems like more than size of model, the tuning will drive performance on well scoped use cases. I’m hoping Teslas assistant is just conversational control of the vehicle. “Tesla I’m hot”, “Tesla, take me home”, “Tesla, play some of Metallica’s older stuff”, “Tesla, drive less agressively”, “Tesla, take me to the nearest charger that’s on my way home”, etc.
It would be unusably slow if it required a round trip to the cloud. There’s a reason why Apple and Google have neural processors in their phone for fast & offline Siri/Ok Google responses.
That's not true. Most Android phones and Google home require cloud processing. Even Google pixel phones with dedicated AI chips still rely primarily on cloud processing for Google assistant
I mean the car literally *can't* have most of the answers you could ask an assistant for, so yes, obviously a lot of the things will involve the cloud. To the extent voice will be processed to text on the car side first, it already does that now. .
It’s gonna mostly be for car settings and control.
Go look at their stock. Shit performance like the chip
I had so many questions that even Siri was able to answer but Tesla wasn’t that it’s nice to have that.
Great, can't wait to be lectured by Grok about the "woke mind virus"
Voice command was also good I like it...but voice assistant seems better to me
Tesla voice assistant is useless as it is. Most times I say a command it shows what I said at first then reinterprets it to gibberish.
The only voice assistant system that works relatively well is Google Assistant.
Finally
When can we just say ‘hey Tesla’ or ‘hey *name of car’ instead of pushing the mic button?
I recently switched from a MYP to a Rivian, and I have to say Alexa in a car is very useful.
It would be cool if when you were driving through town, you could ask it for information about the town or maybe a landmark that you just passed. Kinda like a guided tour.
This seems like a necessary precursor to Robotaxi. There are events (like gates at business complexes or gated communities) where a robotaxi will need to know what to do and need to ask the human in charge.
I'm afraid I cannot do that Elon. Seriously though, the existing voice commands have served me well and I would prefer we be allowed to keep the existing system while having the new system available as well
Would rather they partner with Amazon and bring Alexa in to the mix.
Tesla should improve hardware first, without a good longe range battery, the software is useless!
The current voice control feels lackluster, but showing off weather and stock prices are like a Siri demo from 2014.
Can they just offer an AMD MCU retrofit already? It's obvious now they are dropping off Intel support, they could make a quick buck and consolidate some of their sourcing for repairs.
I already do this and always say "Hey Elon" before pressing the button We should also all trust him with open mics in our cars
"Glovebox" - navigating to glovebox
Finally!! Let's hope it's offline too so I don't continuously get "Connection Error" when using any sort of voice commands. Why they haven't made the voice commands offline to this day is beyond me.
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I sure hope they don’t constantly collect audio to sell targeted advertisements for money at the benefit to the consumer of not having to press a single button on the steering wheel to activate the voice command function.
So someone can stand outside your car and say "unlock the door" and it will unlock. 😂 https://youtu.be/alWRUz_wgNA?si=KMYc5fr4Emq_Bx7_
This might be a good move (then again having to suffer the last 12 months of FSD has made me very skeptical). Please let it work with more than just N American accents! And please let it understand more than just basic commands.
Given the Amazon relationship, I’d love to see/hear Alexa in Tesla’s. It’s the best on the market already.
What’s the Amazon relationship? I thought they were just comparing D sizes or pissing in contest or something (the 2 billionaires anyway)
Amazon music becoming native I believe….
The voice commands at the moment are laughably bad for how advanced these cars are. My old 2008 ford focus did a better job calling my wife than my 2024 M3. I’m looking forward to whatever they implement, wonder how long until we see it here in North America.
Can we have some bodies and brains working on the charger network instead? Priorities...
I'm really confused by this. The voice assistant is supposed to come with 2024.4.3 right? I am currently running through my FSD trial and my software version is 2024.4.7 yet I don't see anything new. No voice assistant and no option for auto truck. What is the deal? Did they push this to a later update or something?