Bye, Siri. Make your car give you directions in your own voice.
Forget a random digital voice telling you to turn left in 800 feet. A new service "clones" real voices so that your mom, sister, or even you can be the one giving you directions.
It's called "My Car, My Voice," and it's built into Cerence, the voice software in many cars from Toyota, GM, Audi, Chrysler, BMW, and other automakers. It's only available for the voice assistant built into the car, not Google Assistant or Apple's Siri.
To generate the voice, you need a live person to speak a series of sentences into the Cerence app in your infotainment system, which means you can't make it sound like your favorite celebrity unless you know them IRL. If you can get Timothée Chalamet into your car to record some phrases for you, by all means, please do.
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In case you're wondering what it sounds like, here is Cerence CEO Sanjay Dhawan.
Once you create a voice clone, it can read any text out loud. The new feature is live now.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
