PEIKER acustic Offers Voice-operated Systems and Joins Mercedes-Benz to Integrate Apple iPod®

FRIEDRICHSDORF - PEIKER acustic GmbH and Co. KG has turned its attention to the new technology of in-car speech recognition with the establishment of its skills center for speech-operated systems and vehicle bus connections in the Swabian town of Böblingen.

The company has already registered a few successes. In the current development phase hands-free car kits, Radio/CD, Navigation and Address Books can be controlled by commands and in fact the whole system - with the exception of one speaker-dependent expansion - is speaker-independent.

The system uses "key phrase spotting" to filter out the keywords and ignores any meaningless phrases yet it is also designed in such a way that synonyms can be used. These two "capabilities" of speech-recognition give the user the freedom to use alternative commands. For example when changing the radio station, "please next station," "another station" or "next station" are all equally effective.

A feature in the PEIKER Speech Recognition System is that everything that has a textual base, using "Grapheme to Phoneme" transformation (abbreviated to G2P), can later be "understood" by the system. In other words the user can query data per language which was manually input via the keyboard and no more additional "verbal training" is required.

In addition to the speaker-independent possibilities of the system there is also the option of a speaker-dependent expansion. It could be conceivable that a driver does not always have his mobile telephone with him when driving but regularly wants to dial specific numbers when he is in the car. In such a case the speaker-dependent expansion of the PEIKER solution would be effective. The user must "enter" the appropriate name with the associated data twice into the system and then this data is integrated and retrievable at any time.

Access to the navigation is available via whole word inputs.

PEIKER acustic also joined together with Mercedes-Benz to inter-connect the vehicle with the Apple iPod®.

The iPod® Interface Kit was developed for Mercedes-Benz Accessories GmbH and it provides Apple iPod® in-car integration. The iPod® Interface Kit will be launched to the American market in April 2005 together with the new Mercedes-Benz M-Class; further classes are to follow later this year.  In Europe on the other hand, the iPod® Interface Kit will be seen first in the B-Class as of June this year.  The system is suitable for all iPods® of the third generation, iPod® mini, iPod® photo and iPod® U2.

The user connects the iPod® to the designated docking station in the glove compartment and up to 10,000 songs are available throughout all the vehicle speakers. The MP3 Player is operated via an integrated key on the multifunctional steering wheel and the driver calls up all the iPod® menu functions such as "Album," "Title" or "Artist" and at the same time to control the volume. The selected menu item is then displayed on the main display of the dashboard panel.