Shanghai OnStar — GM’s China-based telematics subsidiary — announced several new features at the 12th Guangzhou International Auto Show. Among the new features are two new services — Weather Check and Reservation. Both rely on cloud computing services to deliver what their respective name implies.
Weather Check
The Weather Check service provides up-to-date weather information for the customer’s current location and destination.
Reservation
The Reservation service enables customers to book hotels and buy airplane tickets while driving, as well as make service/maintenance appointments with dealers.
The new services are accessed via the white OnStar Services/Voice Recognition button. Whether GM-OnStar plans on introducing a comparable service to subscribers in North America is unknown. We’ve reached out to GM for comment and will update this article upon hearing back.
Comments
This title (and article) needs a bit of revision as these features are mostly available in the USA already. It should read “OnStar China announces…”
For example, you can say “Weather Forecast” dating back to 2008 MY cars. A direct path was added in OnStar 8.0. Earlier cars can access this through Virtual Advisor, and after the prompt ends saying “weather forecast” then.
Unfortunately, GM never really promoted these features. Worse, those with only OnStar Safe & Sound are told at the Virtual Advisor prompt that they do not have the right subscription… you have to know to say “weather forecast” at the silence at the end of the call in order to trigger the feature from Virtual Advisor.
That “bug” has existed in OnStar for nearly five years. Almost as long as the uber-loud “HERE’s THE WEATHER” that the IVR proclaims, cracking your speaker at higher volumes.
I really should get paid for this stuff.
Actually, these don’t seem to be Virtual Advisor features. Instead, they seem to be part of the new wave of cloud services that don’t rely on the archaic yet trusty Virtual Advisor set. Again, we’ve reached out for official clarification but haven’t heard back yet.
The title is fine given/if this is a new wave of services. And the content reflects their China-only nature.
If it’s done by the voice recognition button, it’s exactly the same method that I’ve been using in my 2009 G6 since day one. There’s no need to see if it’s coming stateside – it originated stateside.
If it was using MyLink, that would be a different story – but that’s not the press release. It sounds like GM China is simply implementing features that are already in GMNA’s OnStar. Which is nice, but you can already do all this stuff with OnStar stateside.
But that’s just the thing. The Chinese system has had the features we’re discussing for a while now. And the fact that it’s done via the white voice rec button doesn’t mean much, because it’s the back-end that seems to be different for the way the Chinese-market system is doing this. Either way, that’s why we’re trying to get clarification.