Microsoft and XPeng Motors Cooperate to Equip Cars With “Human Voice” Driver Assistance

On Friday, Microsoft officially announced that with the support of TTS (Text to Speech), a deep neural network based on Microsoft Azure, Chinese electric vehicle company XPeng Motors has successfully upgraded its driver assistance function, further improving the technical level of such features in intelligent vehicles.

At present, Chinese users who buy an XPeng P7 can upgrade to the brand-new intelligent driver assistance service “XPILOT,” which is comparable to a human voice, through OTA (Over-The-Air) technology. XPeng Motors also plans to introduce this technology upgrade to other models through OTA.

With Microsoft’s research achievements in the fields of speech, natural language and machine translation in the past few years, the fluency, quality, fidelity and ease of driver assistance technology have been greatly improved. These innovations have successfully helped enterprises like XPeng Motors and brought richer and more attractive user experiences to their customers.

During the cooperation between Microsoft and XPeng Motors, which has spanned several months, the two firms joined hands to overcome three technical challenges faced by the application of speech synthesis technology.

Firstly, in order to solve the problem of unstable networks while driving and to ensure the continuous high-quality operation of voice functions, XPeng Motors has built a multi-level cache architecture, which can preset and store high-quality voice files in advance, minimizing the function’s dependence on network connection.

Secondly, in order to provide an experience comparable to human voices without occupying too many resources, XPeng Motors used the cache and compression functions of Microsoft Azure to reduce voice files to a sampling rate of 24KHz and a quantization level of 16 bits, which greatly cuts down on the resource pressure of data networks and vehicle computing power.

SEE ALSO: XPeng Delivered 16,000 Smart EVs in December 2021, a 181% Increase YoY

Finally, both enterprises have made many improvements in reducing the ambiguity of synthesized speech and increasing the accuracy of word pronunciation.

Thanks to the efforts of both parties, the brand-new on-board speech synthesis function has reached a new level in speech fidelity, functionality and scenario optimization. Also, XPeng Motors can deploy this driver assistance in more scenarios, making it indispensable in intuitive driving experience.

In addition to XPeng Motors, Microsoft has also carried out in-depth cooperation with many automobile manufacturers and partners in the field of intelligent vehicles, focusing on boosting the intelligent applications in the automobile industry.