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Personalisation is set to be the next significant hurdle for car manufacturers and Nuance thinks it has the perfect solution with a fresh new update to its Dragon Drive product.

In today’s economical era of car use, there is a high chance that one vehicle will have more than a single driver. In these cases, each specific driver will have their own preference for configuring different aspects of the car.

Rather than having to tweak a whole host of settings before a driver embarks on a new journey, Nuance has added a new biometrics feature to Dragon Drive, its speech recognition product for the connected car.

Passphrase activation

Using a passphrase, drivers will gain access to content based on their own preferences, which could include music stations, navigation routes, traffic information, calendar reminders, parking and fuel options along their journey.

The importance of personalisation in connected cars is underlined by Jeffrey Hannah, director at automotive research company SBD, who wants to see cars offer each driver their own individual experience.

“The next frontier for connected cars will be contextualising and personalising content,” he said. “In order to enable this, car makers are rushing to find innovative new ways of detecting who is actually driving their cars and proactively delivering the information they need, when they need it.

In-car virtual assistant

Nuance has also announced that it will be supplementing biometrics functionality with its own take on the virtual assistant, Dragon Drive Daily Update, that will be activated as soon as a driver into their car.

The spoken bulletin can be tailored to each driver, for example it might include their predicted commute time as soon as the car is started, followed by the day’s weather and the previous evening’s football scores.

Hyundai, a current Nuance partner, uses Dragon Drive’s voice activation for its infotainment system, while BMW uses the system to help drivers transcribe emails and text messages. Nuance will be hoping it can add more manufacturers off the back of its biometrics launch.