December 22nd, 2019

It is quite common for Elon Musk to pay tribute with Easter Eggs, Inspiration Credit, or just flat out blatant features like "Keep Summer Safe" which stem from pop culture television and movies.

One amazing car which Elon and Tesla have yet to pay tribute to is Knight Rider.

What is so cool about Knight Rider? Well it is pretty damn close to a Tesla already.

If Tesla pulls off FSD as they intend in the near future, this is one incredible piece of the Knight Rider puzzle.

Tesla vehicles already know your pre-programmed schedule in Google Calendar. By adding features which make it more interactive, Google Calendar can work even better. That is, if the calendar knows everywhere you go and how you got there, it can quickly pickup on daily trends. After all, how many places to you frequently go? For me, almost all of them.

Voice integration exists in the car. But even over the last few years it has been ... not necessarily criticised, but definitely lacking in ways that are quite easily implemented. Why is it that I can't adjust the cars temperature with my voice the same way I could with the screen or the app? And while the car gives directions through navigation, it doesn't really interact with me. But could it? I would say definately. This isn't nearly as difficult and costly a problem as FSD. So why would Tesla not have interactive voice to the extent that Alexa or Google Home have? In the very least, it could utilize Google's Tensor Flow API to get this going in the very near term.

Weird that Tesla wouldn't release useful safety features. Very uncharacteristic of them. But perhaps the explanation is quite simple. They are releasing it. But it isn't ready yet. And what could be the hold up for simple additional voice integration? The answer is complex voice integration.

With regards to development, the best reason to justify not doing something better is to do something WAY better.

However, doing something WAY better only makes sense if you have all the rest of the puzzle pieces in place. So, when Tesla releases FSD, you can expect a Deep Calendar integration and when you have those pieces to the puzzle, I speculate that Tesla will release voice interaction comparable to the likes of KITT.

I expect, although maybe not at first, the Telsa app will have voice capabilities as well. You might be able summon your car by voice, heat it up etc. as you can today... but with voice.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Software Developer always striving to be better. Learn from others' mistakes, learn by doing, fail fast, maximize productivity, and really think hard about good defaults. Computer developers have the power to add an entire infinite dimension with a single Int (or maybe BigInt). The least we can do with that power is be creative.