How Toyota’s Google Cloud-powered Voice Assistant Gives a Turboboost to Drivers’ Experience
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Over the decades, technology has helped us organize large amounts of physical information in ways that are streamlined, efficient, and easily accessible. Rows upon rows of encyclopedias are no longer needed; simply punch in or speak a query into Google Search and find numerous results at your fingertips. There’s no need to haul around cases of CDs or cassettes either, when you can access hundreds of thousands of songs on music streaming services.
We wanted to bring that same level of accessibility to one specific type of publication: the printed car manual. Here’s how we shifted the paper manual to become an easy-to-access, voice-activated digital experience for owners of the all-new Sienna. It’s helped this resource become just as modern and useful as Toyotas themselves.
Putting cloud technology in the driver’s seat
Far too often, the printed car manual remains unused, collecting dust in the glove compartment—that is, until it’s needed during a roadside emergency or to solve the meaning of a mysterious light popping up on the dashboard. Even then, thumbing through hundreds of pages during high-stakes moments can be stressful. On top of that, these manuals can be expensive to print and update.
Digital versions, such as a PDF file, are a nice start. But, they’re often little more than reformatted flat documents. In poor visual conditions on the side of a road, the last thing a driver wants to do is squint at a phone or scroll through pages of tiny text. And similar to printed manuals, digital versions don’t facilitate ongoing, real-time conversations between drivers and automakers when it matters the most; they’re often only text and pictures, and at best, schematic drawings.
With that in mind, we set out to elevate and personalize the car manual by creating a voice-activated digital owner’s manual experience, all powered by Google Cloud. A voice-based assistant was the clear choice because, as it felt like the most intuitive, natural option, especially while driving. In fact, 51% of U.S. adults have used a voice assistant while driving, and 95% of all drivers expect to use a voice assistant in the next three years.
We’re now putting this technology on the road by powering the Toyota Driver’s Companion for the all-new 2021 Toyota Sienna model. Accessible through the existing Toyota app, this companion provides real-time assistance, any time of the day. Drivers can ask questions and the companion will efficiently provide helpful answers in convenient ways, from voice to 3D walkthroughs and explorable environments.
What a modern car manual should do
The Toyota Driver’s Companion has interactive features to help drivers discover the Sienna’s dashboard, set up the car’s interior and exterior appearance, better understand vehicle maintenance, and explore Dynamic Radar Cruise Control, Lane Departure Alert and other features.
Here are a few other additional key features to call out within the Toyota Driver’s Companion:
- An easily accessible virtual voice through the Toyota Driver’s Companion lets app users ask personal questions about their 2021 Sienna such as “what’s the height of my car?” and receive immediate answers either by voice, display or interactive input.
- The manual automatically connects with the purchased vehicle’s VIN number to create a completely personalized experience, curated specifically for the driver. For example, if an unfamiliar light on the dashboard pops up, the Toyota Driver’s Companion can help identify the light’s meaning.
- Interactive hotspots throughout the vehicle’s interior let drivers explore the cabin virtually. Drivers can discover button functionalities, find specific dials, and learn more about car functions, such as how to slide seats or open doors, to become acclimated with their new vehicle.
To bring this experience to life, we tapped into some of our key Google Cloud solutions:
- APIs powered by Google Cloud artificial intelligence technology make accessing specific vehicle information easy and effortless, by leveraging Google’s natural language processing:
- Google Cloud DialogFlow API serves as the decision tree that gives intelligence for both finding an answer for a question, i.e., how the Companion responds to the end user’s questions.
- One of our Text-to-Speech APIs—called Wavenet—creates the Companion’s realistic voice.
- And finally, our Speech-to-Text API “listens” to the user’s voice and finds the correct information to craft responses. That means a driver can ask a question multiple ways, and the Companion will still respond with the right answer.
Our Firebase mobile app dev platform gleans analytic insights that help improve the overall experience and services for OEMs and drivers alike.https://www.youtube.com/embed/66QxWS-PzIM?enablejsapi=1&
We’re encouraging better consumer experiences by providing faster access to fresh information, in a natural, accessible format—voice. But these new voice-activated experiences aren’t only an opportunity to help out drivers; it’s also about strengthening connections between drivers, their vehicles, and automakers, too.
Our hope is that through this information exchange, drivers can provide feedback on the most frequently misunderstood features, enabling OEMs to address questions early on. By understanding the most requested features, OEMs can also predict and inform driver questions about features. We’re incredibly excited to help make the driver’s experience more connected and helpful.
Le Figaro Uses Google Firebase to Personalize Experiences and Generates 3X Revenue Results
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Le Figaro, established in 1826, is France’s oldest and largest daily morning newspaper. The company’s mission is to provide timely, digestible and engaging news to their readers. As one of the first in the industry to offer digital content, Le Figaro engages their subscribers across 11 Android, iOS and web apps that cover news, sports, lifestyle and games. Le Figaro has about 22M monthly active users on their mobile and web apps and 120K paid digital subscribers.
The Challenge
In a saturated news app market, Le Figaro was looking to increase paying customers and to retain existing paid subscribers. To do this, Le Figaro’s development team needed to engage readers with personalized content at the right price point, but how could they pull it off with limited time and resources?
The Solution
Le Figaro used a number of Firebase products to retain existing users and increase paid subscriptions. They sent targeted notifications through Firebase Cloud Messaging reminding customers to follow topics and journalists they found interesting. This helped reduce churn by keeping subscribers engaged in content they valued. They also tested different subscription amounts using Firebase A/B testing, which helped Le Figaro identify the price points that led to the highest number of conversions among both Android and iOS users.
“Using Firebase has completely transformed Le Figaro’s digital business by making it easy to rapidly innovate and personalize content for our readers. With Firebase we have seen continuous increases in retention, downloads and screen time in our apps!”
Valentin Paquot, Mobile CTO, Le Figaro
Le Figaro found their biggest increase in paid subscriptions came from embedding real time interactive infographics into their mobile and web app articles. When a user added information into the infographic, it triggered a Cloud Function that accessed data stored in Cloud Firestore and returned a personalized infographic to the user in real time.
For example, in the article “Are you rich?” readers could input their income into the infographic and compare it against different income groups in Paris instantaneously. The infographics was behind a paywall and users had to subscribe to gain access.
According to Le Figaro, this infographic saw 3X the rate of paid subscription sign-ups compared to their other infographics. The team built this interactive infographic system in 3 days instead of their average time of 2-3 weeks using a traditional backend service. Using Cloud Functions and Cloud Firestore, they estimate they were able to reduce development time by 86%.
Google Maps Platform Helps BungkusIT Fulfil its Promise of Deliveries in One Hour!
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Editor’s note: Today’s post is written by Hatim M, Chief Commercial Officer at BungkusIT. The on-demand delivery service delivers packages within the hour for one million customers across Malaysia and uses Google Maps Platform to create a seamless end-to-end delivery experience for its customers.
Imagine it’s the end of a long day at work, and you’re heading home for dinner as you look forward to a restful evening. Then just as you arrive at the doorstep, your phone buzzes with a message from a family member, asking if you could grab a carton of milk from the supermarket.
With moments like these in mind, we founded BungkusIT to alleviate the stress of everyday chores and give people a break from having to run seemingly mundane errands that can often be time-consuming. With so much to do and so few hours in a day, we want to make life simpler by providing our customers with an on-demand delivery service.
As a social enterprise, our mission is to create jobs and increase earning potential for BungkusIT roadies (those who run deliveries), while also increasing online visibility for local small and medium enterprises through an e-commerce platform. As such, we don’t charge merchants a fee for being featured on our app.
Our roadies help connect users with products and services that they need. Whether it’s picking up the keys you forgot, or buying a birthday cake for a loved one, our on-demand roadies can help accomplish your task quickly and efficiently. In fact, we’ve helped many seniors—a large and often underserved population—to run errands and provide last mile support.
Providing reliable service, 24/7
From the day we launched, our promise has always been to complete every task given to us within one hour. Google Maps Platform empowers us to fulfil this promise. We understand the importance of selecting a reliable mapping service from the get-go. After exploring different map products, we made the decision to go with Google Maps Platform due to its detailed and accurate location mapping system. With the support of our partner Searce, we’ve been able to quickly integrate all the relevant products on our platform and optimize our API calls.
On a day-to-day basis, our roadies rely on the Places API to navigate their journeys. It pinpoints the exact location set by customers so that our roadies can be sure they arrive at the correct destination. With so many small roads and alleys in Malaysia, it can be challenging to find the exact place based on an address. Dropping a pin on a specific location removes any confusion.
Because we price our services based on distance, it’s business critical to determine the exact distance of a location and the most efficient route to reach it. By automating that process with the Distance Matrix API, we can guarantee that customers don’t get overcharged, while making sure that we’re adequately compensated for our services.
Improving the user experience
At the end of the day, we want to make people’s lives easier. That’s why having an app that is intuitive is key. More than that, we want customers to be able to create a request as quickly as possible. By automatically completing the location a customer is typing after they’ve keyed in the first few characters, Place Autocomplete does that job for us.
As a fairly young company, we’ve got a long way to go. I believe that we’ll continue evolving alongside Google Maps Platform and exploring the new features it has to offer. We’re already talking to global brands to expand our services and I’m confident that with Google Maps Platform as our maps partner, we will go a long way.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.
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Choosing ROI criteria that drive smart decisions about digital investments is necessary to win in the app economy. But according to an Apigee Institute survey of IT and Marketing executives, there is a wide gap between what corporate leaders believe are the best ROI metrics and what are actually used in most enterprises today. Those who move first to bridge the gap will be able to move further and faster towards digital transformation and market leadership.
This special report drills down on patterns and practices for digital ROI that drive more confident decision making and stronger results based on empirical analysis of 200 large companies. Read the report to understand how you can drive decisions about digital investments to the next level of actionability and strengthen digital capabilities by building stronger organizational alignment. The report explores how top performing digital businesses evaluate and make decisions about digital investments using data analytics, by deploying apps, and operating APIs.
Rhode Island’s VCC Platform Built on GCP Helps Jobseekers Get Back to Work!
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2020 brought many challenges, especially as in-person operations were shut down, and many were left vulnerable to unemployment.
The State of Rhode Island responded to these challenges, by modernizing their workforce development operations and moving completely to a custom online platform called the Virtual Career Center, also nicknamed “the VCC.”
It was developed in partnership with Google Cloud and a nonprofit called “Research Improving People’s Lives” (RIPL), and was fully built by Google Cloud partner Maven Wave, which helps a wide array of organizations, including public sector customers, with many types of cloud initiatives.
In this episode of Architecting with Google Cloud, we interviewed Joel Osman, head of Digital Experience & Custom Applications at MavenWave who shared a lot of insights such as:
“We looked at how we can apply leading edge emerging technologies to help people get back to work and use them as tools in such a way that we can augment the personal one to one interactions that agencies had been using with job seekers, to help them get back to work.”
One of those key benefits is enabling job seekers to find coaches that are specialized in their respective community. During the in-person walk-in model, applicants were paired on a first come first serve basis with any available coach on site. Meanwhile online scheduling has enabled a greater opportunity to match veterans, college graduates, non-English speakers, etc with coaches with prior experience in that specific area.
How the VCC was built
This VCC web app was built on Angular. It has a custom frontend built on top of 2 key Google Cloud products. The first is Workspace, which includes functionality such as video conferencing, documents, slides, chat, file storage, etc. And the other is Google Cloud computing resources. Here’s a view of the architecture:
There are 3 main types of users at this time, and that’s job coaches, job seekers, and employers.
- 👩🔧 Job Coaches all have Google IDs in the Google Workspace domain, and therefore authenticate against the Google identity repository.
- 🕵️♂️ Job Seekers are authenticated through a Cognito-based process maintained by the nonprofit I mentioned earlier (RIPL), the Rhode Island infrastructure team, and the Department of Information Technology (DoIT). Cognito was an identity repository setup prior to this project for users interacting with the State, and remained as their form of authentication.
- 🧭 Employers participate directly with Google Meet, and, to an extent, Google Calendar; but not the Angular app. There’s also a focus on building a future dashboard to see how the center has helped employers with applicants.
The specific Google Cloud components used are the following:
- Firestore: realtime Database that keeps data in sync across client apps.
- BigQuery: serverless warehouse for data.
- Data Studio: is used to build filterable dashboards over BigQuery
- Cloud Functions: which serve as triggers to keep scheduling and data workflows in sync.
- Kubernetes cluster: runs & autoscales the server-side code in a single-region deployment, with a minimum of four nodes per zone across three zones of the US East region.
- Cloud Armor: protects applications and websites from attacks, and sets NIST-compliant policies.
- Google’s Content Distribution Network (CDN): content is accessed and cached.
To manage the lifecycle of the infrastructure, a Terraform script is used, which is an open source tool, and is structured into 5 folder environments:
- Admin
- Dev
- QA & UAT
- Networks
- Prod
- Shared Services (for CI/CD pipelines between Dev & Prod).
Adoption outcomes
A universal fear we technical practitioners may have is:
“Will our tool be loved and adopted by our intended audiences?”
Joel mentioned Job Coaches at the time were not used to working from home, and the team was concerned that they would potentially feel overwhelmed with a lot of new technology.
As a rewarding surprise, when Job Coaches were presented the proof of concept, it was received with positivity.
“95% of Job Coaches rated the VCC as a valuable solution and 87% reported to find it very or extremely effective.”
This alignment was thanks to designing the tool with the users in mind, and performing user research since the beginning of the journey, which helped address their day to day needs.
Additional innovation for the future
After creating a centralized hub and moving operations to a digital format, many more benefits also arise. For example, there can now be an integrated data analytics view which enables meaningful dashboards that can be customized for different audiences such as job applicants, coaches, program stakeholders, or state agencies.
There can be improved job searchability by integrating machine learning, helping with resume building and parsing that take keywords out of a resume and match them to a variety of relevant job clusters, rather than just performing raw keyword searches.
Embedding chat bots can also help reduce the load of call centers in states, as they utilize natural language processing as well to help guide job seekers with prompt answers.
Conclusion
The State of Rhode Island’s Virtual Career Center is an amazing success story. By having worked with an experienced partner to move their operations to a digital format, they were able to respond to their citizen’s needs in a time where in-person operations were not possible. They also unlocked opportunities such as better matching and reporting along that journey.
For any organization whether they are in the public sector, university, private sector, etc; anyone can take advantage of this platform and customize it to their needs as Maven Wave shared that they offer a menu of options, where you can pick and choose functionality based on your requirements, IT resources, and budget.
Announcing Apigee’s Pay-as-you-go pricing to provide flexibility and scale seamlessly
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Apigee is Google Cloud’s API management platform that enables organizations to build, operate, manage and monetize their APIs. Customers from industries around the world trust Apigee to build and scale their API programs.
While some organizations operate with mature API-first strategies, others might still be working on a modernization strategy. Even within an organization, different teams often end up with diverse use cases and choices for API management. From our conversations with customers, we are increasingly hearing the need to align our capabilities and pricing with such varied workloads.
We’re excited to introduce a Pay-as-you-go pricing model to enable customers to unlock Apigee’s API management capabilities whilst retaining the flexibility to manage their own costs. Starting today, customers will have the option to use Apigee by paying only for what they are using. This new pricing model is offered as a complement to the existing Subscription plans (or) the ability to evaluate it for free.
Start small, but powerful with Pay-as-you-go pricing
The new Pay-as-you-go pricing model offers flexibility for organizations to:
- Unlock the value of Apigee with no upfront commitment: Get up and running quickly without any upfront purchasing or commitment
- Maintain flexibility and control in costs: Adapt to ever-changing needs whilst maintaining low costs. You can continue to automatically scale with Pay-as-you-go or switch to Subscription tiers based on your usage
- Provide freedom to experiment: Every API management use case is different and with Pay-as-you-go you can experiment with new use cases by unlocking value provided by Apigee without a long term commitment
Pay-as-you-go pricing works just like the rest of your Google Cloud bills, allowing you to get started without any license commitment or upfront purchasing. As part of the Pay-as-you-go pricing model, you will only be charged based on your consumption of
- Apigee gateway nodes: You will be charged on your API traffic based on the number of Apigee gateway nodes (a unit of environment that processes API traffic) used per minute. Any nodes that you provision would be charged every minute and billed for a minimum of one minute.
- API analytics: You will be charged for the total number of API requests analyzed per month. API requests, whether they are successful or not, are processed by Apigee analytics. Analytics data is preserved for three months.
- Networking usage: You will be charged on the networking (such as IP address, network egress, forwarding rules etc.,) based on usage
When is Pay-as-you-go pricing right for me?
Apigee offers three different pricing models
- Evaluation plan to access Apigee’s capabilities at no cost for 60 days
- Subscription plans across Standard, Enterprise or Enterprise plus based on your predictable but high volume API needs
- Pay-as-you-go without any startup costs
Subscription plans are ideal for use cases with predictable workloads for a given time period, whereas Pay-as-you-go pricing is ideal if you are starting small with a high value workload. Here are a few use cases where organizations would choose Pay-as-you-go if they want to:
- Establish usage patterns before choosing a Subscription model
- Evolve their API program by starting with high value and low volume API use cases
- Manage and protect your applications build on Google cloud infrastructure
- Migrate or modernize your services gradually without disruption
Next steps
Every organization is increasingly relying on APIs to build new applications, adopt modern architectures or create new experiences. In such transformation journeys, Apigee’s Pay-as-you-go pricing will provide flexibility for organizations to start small and scale seamlessly with their API management needs.
- To get started with Apigee’s Pay-as-you-go pricing go to console or try it for free here
Check out our documentation and pricing calculator for further details on Apigee’s Pay-as-you-go pricing for API management. For comparison and other information, take a look at our pricing page.
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