Affectiva and Nuance to offer assistance

US company Affectiva plans to develop a joint automotive assistant which detects driver distraction and drowsiness and voices recommendations such as navigating to a coffee shop. The solution is intended to align its dialogue to a motorist’s emotional state based on facial and verbal expressions. The integrated solution will combine the Affectiva Automotive AI solution with UK-based Nuance Communications’ Dragon Drive platform. Affectiva Automotive AI measures facial expressions and emotions such as ange
December 6, 2018 Read time: 2 mins
US company Affectiva plans to develop a joint automotive assistant which detects driver distraction and drowsiness and voices recommendations such as navigating to a coffee shop. The solution is intended to align its dialogue to a motorist’s emotional state based on facial and verbal expressions.


The integrated solution will combine the Affectiva Automotive AI solution with UK-based Nuance Communications’ Dragon Drive platform.

Affectiva Automotive AI measures facial expressions and emotions such as anger and surprise as well as verbal expressions in real time. It also displays icons which indicate drowsiness such as yawning, eye closure and blink rates and physical or mental distraction.Through the partnership, Dragon Drive will enable the in-car assistant to interact with passengers via emotional and cognitive state detection. It currently facilitates this correspondence through gesture, touch, gaze detection and voice recognition powered by natural language understanding.

Stefan Ortmanns, executive vice president and general manager, Nuance Automotive, says these additional modes of interaction will help its OEM partners develop automotive assistants which can ensure the safety and efficiency of connected and autonomous cars.

In the future, the automotive assistant may also be able to take control of semi-autonomous vehicles if the driver displays signs of physical or mental distraction.

Detection, Monitoring & Machine Vision

Related Content

  • USDoT looks at the costs and potential benefits of connected vehicles
    October 26, 2017
    David Crawford looks at latest lessons learned from the trials of connected vehicles in the US. The progress of connected vehicle (CV) technologies takes centre stage among the hot topics highlighted in the September 2017 edition – the first since 2014 – of the ‘ITS Benefits, Costs and Lessons Learned’ survey from the US ITS Joint Program Office (JPO). The organisation is an arm of the US Department of Transportation (USDoT).
    Read More
  • BlackBerry warns of hacking danger
    May 9, 2022
    As connected vehicles inch towards becoming a common sight, there are concerns that they are ripe for hacking by malign actors. Alan Dron looks at BlackBerry’s 2022 Threat Report
    Read More
  • Here: AI has place in ‘privacy by design’
    June 23, 2020
    Artificial intelligence may improve traffic in cities and keep location data private, but Here Technologies shows that it only takes four points of anonymous data to predict your identity.
    Read More
  • Europe’s road safety gains have stagnated EU
    March 17, 2017
    Europe will fail to meet its road death targets as enforcement budgets are slashed and drivers face an epidemic of distractions. The European Union will not achieve its aim of halving the number of people killed on its roads each year by 2020, delegates to Tispol’s (the organisation of European traffic police) annual conference in Manchester were told. “The target will be missed because there was only a 17% decrease in road fatalities across Europe between 2010 and 2015 when [the rate of reduction] should h
    Read More

Highlighted Content