Your Car Will Now See, Feel and Talk, Thanks to Honda and SoftBank Corp.

MANILA: Have you ever wondered that your car can see what you do? Hear what you speak? Sense how you feel? Probably not, but with the collaboration between two giants Honda and SoftBank, these would soon be a reality. The future is here, yes you heard that right, the automotive giant from Japan after being featured in the top five auto companies in the Philippines for the half of 2016 is ready to grant your car real feelings by implementing artificial intelligence (AI).

This is crazy, literally, it is. Your car would now be able to react to your actions and would also be able to express its emotions. The main motive of the Japanese auto giant here is to build a relationship between people and machine and with the machine, we refer to the mobile vehicle. This insane future project has been given birth by SoftBank’s founder, Masayoshi Son, who now in partnership with Honda is ready to ride on his vision.

According to the sources, the two organizations will be working on a technology that can allow a vehicle to sense, analyze and engage with driver’s emotions via in-car sensors and cameras. In addition to this, the technology would also aid in offering assistance to the driver while on the go and would also accompany him/her on a lonely drive. Further, the system would assist in parking as well as build a strong bond between the vehicle and the driver.

As mentioned by the founder himself at an event, the Pepper robot, which is a humanoid robot developed by a collective effort of Aldebaran Robotics and SoftBank has to have an important role to play in this project.

According to Reuters, Son said, “Imagine if robots, with their super intelligence, devoted themselves to humans. And imagine that cars themselves became super computers or robots one day. Honda will be the first to adopt this technology.”

There will be a separate branch of R&D department that will focus on intelligent technologies at Honda’s Innovation Lab Tokyo in Akasaka by Sep 2016. The information will be gathered as an inference of conversations with the driver as well as via sensors fitted inside the car to understand the driver’s emotions. Once put in work, it would be an incredible advancement in the automotive industry. Till then all we can do is wait and hope everything goes well.