Exclusive pictures in...
Exclusive pictures in this week"s mag are based on information from within the company, and provide the first glimpse of a car that will aim to tempt image-conscious buyers away from established favourites, such as Audi"s A3 and the Volkswagen Golf. As Volvo"s first small hatchback since the conservative 440 was dropped back in 1997, the V30 would be joined by a sporty three-door variant, which is expected to be called the S30.
The boffins have been...
The boffins have been working on speech-recognition systems which allow motorists to tell their vehicle what to do and regulate controls simply by speaking.
It will soon be possible to operate the radio and sat-nav, open and close windows, adjust the heating plus alter seat positions without moving a finger from the steering wheel or eyes from the road. Researchers at Siemens VDO in Munich are adding tiny digital cameras to speech recognisers, so that an on-board computer can literally read the lips of the driver when there is too much background noise.
The camera software has been trained to decipher the lip movements for hundreds of different words after groups of volunteers worked on the project. Blue dots placed on bright red lips and whitened skin have taught the cameras to see the way the mouth moves with each word, so that the system will eventually be able to recognise commands from millions of drivers.
The first stage of the programme comes later this year, when Siemens VDO launches a microphone-only system for car makers, with a multilingual vocabulary of 30,000 words. Most adults know and use only about 12,000 words in their native language. The camera set-up is expected in a few years" time.
"It"s still early days, but we"re progressing well," said Gerhard Hoffman of the Siemens technology team. "This system will enhance speech recognition in noisy environments such as convertibles."