No more talking to yourself in the car, Mercedes owners. Your car can now talk back.
Mercedes will upgrade its MBUX Voice Assistant with an artificial-intelligence-driven conversation bot in millions of cars this week, the company announced.
The company says the new function began rolling out Tuesday to “over 3 million vehicles globally with the MBUX infotainment system. It will initially be offered in three languages: German, British English, and American English.”
As before, you can start the chatbot by saying, “Hey, Mercedes,” or pushing the microphone button on the steering wheel. However, it can now handle general knowledge questions.
It builds on a ChatGPT-based system the company introduced last year but adds new capabilities.
It Remembers What You’re Talking About
“Using AI, the MBUX Voice Assistant can now provide up-to-date answers to knowledge-based questions by initiating a Microsoft Bing search. It then creates natural language responses using ChatGPT through Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service,” the company explains.
It retains memory of your conversations for an hour, so you can ask casual follow-up questions.
For example, Mercedes says, “The question could be: ‘How many Grammy awards has a certain artist won?’ After receiving the answer, the user could add: ‘When was the first?’ and the system would respond correctly as it already understands the background.”
Volkswagen employs a similar system in some of its 2025 cars, using ChatGPT. But Mercedes is the first automaker we know of to roll out an AI chatbot assistant to vehicles already in customer driveways.
Mercedes says it retains some records of your conversations “in the Mercedes-Benz Intelligent Cloud, where it is anonymized and analyzed.”
The company has also taken steps “to mitigate the risk of customers accessing toxic, harmful or illegal content” with “a risk assessment tool to evaluate system responses and identify best practices to reduce the possibility of harmful responses.”
