TomTom & Microsoft In-Vehicle  AI Voice Assistant; FTC Bans Rite Aid from Facial Surveillance System; Playstation 5 Sales over 50 Million; Tesla Blamed Drivers for Parts Failures

TomTom has partnered with Microsoft to develop an AI voice assistant for vehicles. Thenextweb.com reports that the automotive assistant enables voice interaction with location search, infotainment, and vehicle command systems. This means that drivers can “converse” with the vehicle, ask questions about navigation directions or route stops, and use voice control to regulate the temperature, for instance, or open the windows and change radio stations. The assistant works across multiple Microsoft products, including its Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Kubernetes Services, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Cognitive Services. It’s already built into TomTom’s Digital Cockpit, the company’s own in-vehicle infotainment platform, but can also be integrated into other automotive infotainment systems.

The Federal Trade Commission has banned Rite Aid from using facial surveillance systems for 5 years. According to engadget.com, this comes as part of a settlement with the FTC, which had accused Rite Aid of “reckless use of facial surveillance systems.” The FTC said in its complaint that the drugstore chain deployed an artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition technology from 2012 to 2020 to identify customers who may have previously shoplifted or have engaged in problematic behavior. Apparently, the company had created a database with “tens of thousands” of customer images, along with their names, dates of birth and alleged crimes. Those photos were of poor quality, taken by its security cameras, employees’ phones and even from news stories. As a result, the system generated thousands of false-positive alerts.

Sony’s PlayStation 5 has passed a big milestone…as of today, the company has announced that it has sold over 50 million of the gaming consoles since it launched in late 2020. Theverge.com notes that as recently as last July, they had sold 40 million, so sales are really picking up. Supply chain issues had held back sales for a while, but Sony says this is the first holiday season where anyone who wants to buy a PS5 can get hold of one. Even with supply chain issues, the PS5 hit 50 million in only one week less that the PS4 did. Meanwhile, Nintendo Switch sales dipped 18% this year, and Xbox sales were off 15%. 

A Reuters review of Tesla documents has found that tens of thousands of owners have been the victims of premature failures of suspension or steering parts. Internally, Tesla engineers called part ‘flaws’ and ‘failures,’ yet the company has denied some of the suspension and steering problems in statements to U.S. regulators and the public– and, according to Tesla records, sought to shift some of the resulting repair costs to customers. The company has alleged that owners abused the cars. The automaker charged customers with out-of-warranty cars to replace parts that Tesla engineers internally called flawed or that they knew had high failure rates. Engineers ordered repeated redesigns for several parts and discussed seeking money back from suppliers because of the defects. Unsurprisingly, neither Tesla nor top executive Elon Musk responded to detailed questions for this article by Reuters. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technfied’ for now.