Ford Vehicles May Get Voice Assistant Tracking, Activation

June 14, 2023 12:15 pm

Ford Motor Company has filed a patent for a voice assistant tracking and activation system that may be used in future Ford vehicles, Ford Authority has learned.

The patent was filed on September 28^th, 2021, published on June 13^th, 2023, and assigned serial number 11676601.

The Ford Authority Take

Back in February 2022, Ford filed a patent for a digital personal assistant with a configurable personality that’s somewhat similar to existing features such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Microsoft Cortana, though it would offer user-selectable personality traits, which could potentially make interactions a bit more interesting and personalized. Now, this newly filed patent aims to use that same sort of idea, albeit in a very different way.

We spend quite a bit of time in our vehicles on a regular basis, whether that be sitting in traffic during our morning commutes or while traveling on road trips, and in this day and age, there is a wealth of information and entertainment at our fingertips to make that time a bit more pleasant. This is why voice assistants and voice recognition have become more prevalent, though managing multiple features such has these can be a bit difficult.

That’s where this patent comes into play – it introduces an idea for a system that could track the availability of multiple voice assistant features, using common words to “wake” each of them up. The system would then be able to determine which service it needs to activate based on the wake word used, then establish a connection between a vehicle’s microphone and that particular service.

With so many voice assistant features present in vehicles and on our mobile devices these days, such an idea makes a lot of sense -after all, we’ve all activated one of these services by accident at least once in our lives. As such, it could very well wind up making its way into Ford vehicles of the future.

We’ll have more on this and all Ford patents soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for the latest Ford patent news, Ford business news, and continuous Ford news coverage.

By Brett Foote

Brett's lost track of all the Fords he's owned over the years and how much he's spent modifying them, but his current money pits include an S550 Mustang and 13th gen F-150.