As vehicles grow increasingly connected and become packed with sensors, artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies have the potential to play a significant role in the human-machine interface (HMI), according to a new report from Tractica.
Voice-enabled smart assistants for car controls, infotainment, and more will likely become the leading HMI in the coming era of the connected car. With momentum and regulatory demand for driver and occupant monitoring, emotion recognition and gesture recognition will become more prominent elements of HMI. Due to increasingly sophisticated computer vision algorithms, onboard compute power, and next-generation windscreen and other display technology, 3D augmented reality (AR) will also become an integral component of the connected car experience.
Tractica forecasts that the global market for AI-enabled automotive HMI software will increase from $462.8 million in 2018 to $4.6 billion by 2025. The market intelligence firm anticipates that the vast majority of this revenue will derive from voice and speech recognition applications, with smaller opportunities for driver face analytics and emotion recognition, along with gesture recognition.
"For the connected car, AI-based HMI focuses on driver controls, driver/occupant monitoring/safety, and infotainment. For Level 5 autonomous vehicles, AI-based HMI focuses on occupant monitoring and infotainment," says Principal Analyst Mark Beccue.
Beccue adds that most experts believe the connected car market will, with the help of aftermarket devices, grow rapidly for a number of years, then slowly decline. Meanwhile, the fully autonomous vehicle era will likely grow more slowly due to regulatory and technical challenges before it eventually eats away at connected car market share to a point where autonomous vehicle transportation represents the majority of the automotive market.
"Fast-forward several years to when humans become passengers and vehicles become moving entertainment centers in the autonomous vehicle era, and AI-based automotive HMI technologies will prove invaluable and morph into different use cases," says Beccue.
