Volkswagen Begins Rollout of GenAI-Powered Virtual Assistant for Vehicle Owners

Volkswagen of America partnered with Google Cloud to integrate a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistant into its myVW mobile app for vehicle owners.

The myVW Virtual Assistant is now available to owners of model year 2024 Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport vehicles and will be expanded to most model year 2020 and new Volkswagen vehicles in 2025, the automaker said in a Tuesday (Sept. 24) press release.

The virtual assistant provides vehicles owners with access to information specific to their vehicles, answering questions about things like the way to change a flat tire and the meaning of an indicator light, according to the release.

Vehicle owners can also get information about indicator lights by pointing their smartphone cameras at them, per the release.

“AI is emerging as a utility tool for Volkwagen owners to better understand their vehicles and get answers to questions faster and easier,” Abdallah Shanti, chief information officer at Volkswagen Group of America, said in the release. “Thanks to our strong collaboration with Google Cloud, we’re able to bring valuable technology into our vehicles that help us successfully connect to the car and our customers.”

To build the myVW Virtual Assistant, Volkswagen used Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and BigQuery to ground and fine-tune Gemini models on multiple data sources and leveraged Google Cloud Consulting to help design and deploy the app, according to the release.

To train the virtual assistant, the automaker used vehicle owner’s manuals, customer’s frequently asked questions, help center articles, official Volkswagen YouTube videos and step-by-step guides, per the release.

“Volkswagen is setting a new standard for driver experiences by bringing the power of advanced generative AI directly to its customers,” Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said in the release.

This news comes on the same day that Google announced that more than 2 million developers are building with its generative AI solutions.

Ahead of the global virtual event Gemini at Work, which is being held Tuesday, the company said Gemini is being put to work by companies in a variety of ways.

“We’re inspired by what customers are building and excited how quickly they’ve been able to move ideas from experimentation into production with our Vertex AI platform,” Kurian said in a Tuesday blog post.