Mercedes has announced a new ChatGPT integration in its cars, which enables you to take advantage of ChatGPT’s capabilities when you’re using the Mercedes assistant. ChatGPT rose to fame primarily due to its ability to properly understand English. All major personal assistants were held back by their poor language processing abilities.
Personal assistants’ failure to answer questions is because they don’t understand what you are saying. It is also because they don’t understand what the search results they looked up are saying either. ChatGPT succeeded because it is a large language model that OpenAI trained thoroughly, giving it the ability to read and write fluent English.
This Mercedes ChatGPT integration could enable your car to understand what you are saying with fewer errors. I say this with the assumption that Mercedes’ speech-to-text system is reliable. AI Assistants translate your speech to text and then process the text afterwards with a language model.
Another reason this ChatGPT integration would appeal to Mercedes customers is because ChatGPT is famous for its ability to find solutions to problems. It also presents them to its users in an intuitive manner. This means you could confidently ask it for advice instead of just basic directions. Or is that not safe? Unfortunately, ChatGPT has a little problem that results in it fibbing when it doesn’t know the answer to a question.
My experience with ChatGPT integration led me to discover that it often generates answers that are untrue and which don’t exist for no apparent reason. To clarify: I’m not referring to the issue of ChatGPT pulling false information from websites that lack credibility. I’m referring to the fact that it generates false information itself and even cites sources that don’t exist. For example: it generated court decisions that did not exist and insisted they were real, and provided false citations that did not exist.
Enjoy This ChatGPT Integration, But Use It With Caution
The sheer frequency of the falsely generated answers was concerning. It means that you should check answers provided by ChatGPT or click through to the sources provided and read them. You can ask it to include the source when you enter a question. I emphasized ‘read them’ because it lies about citations too.
Mercedes says that their cars new ChatGPT integration will ‘greatly improve natural language understanding and expand the topics to which it can respond’.
They also said: ‘Soon, participants who ask the Voice Assistant for details about their destination, to suggest a new dinner recipe, or to answer a complex question, will receive a more comprehensive answer.‘
That is likely accurate, but please remember the tips I provided above so that you aren’t mislead. This new ChatGPT integration is provided via Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service.
