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BMW set to make Amazon’s Alexa your back-seat driver this fall

By Lulu Chang Updated August 10, 2016

If you’re a high-tech homeowner, chances are the contents of your garage aren’t so shabby either. So of course, it’s just good sense for Amazon Echo’s Alexa digital assistant to control not only your smart home, but your car as well. And now, if that car is a BMW, Alexa will do just that.

Sometime “later this year,” the German automaker says, you’ll be able to do quite a bit with your BMW with nothing but your voice. From locking your door to checking on how much gas you’ve left in your tank, Alexa can help.

It’s the latest feature to be introduced as part of BMW Connected, which was first unveiled back in March. This smart car system behaves something like a personal assistant with an extremely good sense of direction. By scanning your smartphone’s calendar and address book, BMW Connected will calculate the amount of time it’ll take you to get to an appointment based on real-time traffic information. And after taking vehicle fuel or battery levels into consideration, it’ll even tell you when to leave your house by way of an iPhone or Apple Watch notification. Moreover, you can flash your car’s headlights to help you find it, or turn on the AC in anticipation of your arrival.

Currently, Ford is the only company to offer an Alexa integration, but BMW will soon join these ranks. “The flexible architecture of BMW Connected furthermore facilitates the implementation of new functions and services more of which will be presented in the autumn,” the company said. “The skill integration into Amazon Echo and Alexa-enabled devices demonstrates BMW’s leading role in the area of digitalization.”

So if you’re looking for a way to connect not only your home and its appliances to Amazon Echo and virtual assistant Alexa, look no further than BMW come September.

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Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…

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The BMW 7 Series has been the venerable German automaker’s flagship for more than 40 years, but with its latest redesign, BMW is taking things in a new — and electrifying — direction.
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