Amazon's intelligent assistant Alexa will be going for a ride in select Toyota and Lexus vehicles later this year. [[467735613,R]]
Toyota announced the partnership Tuesday, saying the cloud-based voice assistant would be included in vehicles equipped with the Toyota Entune 3.0 App Suite and Lexus Enform App Suite 2.0, allowing riders to interact with Alexa in the car.
While on the road with a connection to the Internet, Alexa can provide directions, the news, access audio books, adjust smart home settings or a number of other voice-command tasks.
“Voice services are rapidly becoming more popular and through our integration with Amazon Alexa, Toyota and Lexus customers will soon be able to easily speak to Alexa in their cars while on-the-go,” said Zack Hicks, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Toyota Motor North America and Chief Executive Officer and President of Toyota Connected.
“We’re thrilled that Toyota and Lexus will bring Alexa to customers on the road,” said John Scumniotales, Head of Product for Amazon Alexa Automotive. “Our vision for Alexa is that she should be everywhere a customer might need her – at home, in the office, on phones – and in cars. This integration means that customers can interact with Alexa, virtually anywhere they drive.”
Additional models will be available in 2019.
It's worth mentioning that Alexa can also bring you the latest headlines from NBC 5. Simply enable the NBC 5 in the News settings and then you'll hear the latest updates when you ask, "Alexa, what's in the news?"
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On Monday, Toyota announced a partnership with their Plano neighbor that could see Pizza Hut pizzas delivered in autonomous (unmanned) vehicles designed and built by Toyota. You can read more on that here -- and see a rendering of the delivery van.
