Mercedes Adds Smart Home Control
A new capability of Mercedes Benz’s voice assistant MBUX allows users to control their smart home devices from the car. Announced last month, the new voice feature supports Philips, Samsung, TP-Link, and myQ products among others. The MBUX system upgrade enables users to check the status of connected devices as well as activate settings and scenes.
The Circana Take:
- As ownership of smart home devices increases, control of the devices and systems will expand to new environments. The vehicle is a natural next frontier for control - especially as vehicles become more connected.
Alexa Is Getting Smarter
At a recent hardware event, Amazon announced the implementation of a new large language model (LLM) expected to improve Alexa’s understanding of conversational phrases and spoken commands. The enhancement is forecast to roll out to US users in the next few months. One notable enhancement will make Alexa better able to respond to multiple commands at once - a key to managing the smart home.
The Circana Take:
- As consumers become more acquainted with using popular AI applications like Chat GPT they will likely be looking for more capabilities from their digital assistants. Improving the features of these applications is an effort at increasing user engagement with voice assistants- as well as the hardware they run on.