Revealed: How Nvidia's 'backseat driver' AI learned to read lips When Nvidia popped the bonnet on its Co-Pilot "backseat driver" AI at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, most onlookers were struck by its ability to lip-read while tracking CES-going "motorists'" actions within the "car". A slide taken at CES shows the Co-Pilot AI assistant performing four features: facial recognition, …
As much as I love driving, I would still love one of these for longer journeys, I'm thinking I, Robot style jumping between manual and automation. Just need swivel seats in the front and it's good to go! Another 10-15 years and they will probably be mainstream as opposed to niche.
Are you some kind of spy or gangland boss? I'm really struggling to imagine any other moderately likely scenarios where this would be helpful. If I'm incapacitated, I would very much prefer someone to call me an ambulance, than drive me anywhere. If I'm in immediate danger, then being helped to walk (or dragged if absolutely necessary) away from that danger will be fine.
If I'm missing something obvious, and this would actually be necessary, I imagine there would be some kind of emergency override, like all phones have for calling the emergency services.
I like that they are using local processing to collect information from the driver (and other vehicle occupants?) unlike lots of other solutions that feed the raw stuff to a server (or two) for processing.
Of course, I'm guessing the software will then squirt all the extracted information straight to our digital overlords. Which, for me, would be the deal breaker.
The important missing feature is the ability of the driver to program phrase and gesture recognition events into performing tasks and functions of their desire. I foresee my car having an awful lot of events triggering the horn. Soon *honk* will become the new universal adjective.
The facial recognition in place of a key is an interesting idea. That way you can tell your brother-in-law that he can borrow the car whenever he wants, safe in knowing that he never can. Though I do sort of wonder how someone can get into a locked car without any key if the camera faces the driver's seat. Lots of faces smashed into windows, hoping to catch the edge of the camera's field of view? Or just the good ol' fob still needed to be carried everywhere like the key that it is.
Worse, on the opposite side, facial recognition as a key could be a serious security hole. Just print off a picture of someone from their social media of choice and away you go, in their car!
Impressive to whom?
To technologists who can imagine what tracking and interpreting facial features in real time involves, yes it's bloody amazing. But if you were sitting a language exam and got one in fifteen words wrong, you wouldn't score very highly.
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