Toyota has announced that it will be bringing Amazon Alexa to a number of its vehicles. The Japanese automotive company is famous for its big push towards hybrid vehicles in recent years, but it appears improving the technology inside its vehicles is now an increasingly important point for the company. Because of this, at CES 2018, the company has announced that some of its latest Toyota and Lexus vehicles will be updated in the near future with support for Amazon Alexa.
According to Toyota, select 2018 models with the Toyota Entune 3.0 App Suite will receive the update, while certain 2018 models from its luxury marque Lexus will receive a similar treatment, as long as they include the Lexus Enform App Suite 2.0. The inclusion of Alexa in Toyota’s vehicles will provide Amazon with an even wider range of potential users to take advantage of, while owners of Toyota or Lexus cars will be able to take advantage of a number of benefits. Among these is the fact that Alexa connects to a range of third-party smart home products which will be able to be controlled on the go, as well as the option of asking the assistant for directions, play music or request certain information. In total, Alexa has over 10,000 skills and with this number constantly increasing, the possibilities that having the assistant inside vehicles brings are becoming endless. Toyota is yet to reveal which specific models will benefit from the virtual assistant, but considering Toyota’s latest software debuted on the 2018 Camry, the vehicle is certainly a likely candidate. In terms of future plans, Toyota has also revealed that more models will include support in 2019, but it appears the assistant will be limited to US customers for now.
The inclusion of Amazon Alexa in Toyota’s vehicles is only the latest product category to gain support for the assistant. After all, aside from Amazon’s own Echo speakers and Fire tablets, a number of new products have been announced at CES 2018 with support for Alexa, with the retail giant’s deals with Acer, ASUS, HP, and Lenovo perhaps being some of the biggest, due to the fact that they will bring the assistant to millions of Windows 10 users across the globe.