Microsoft Corp is looking forward to teaming up with Taiwanese partners as part of its plans to develop “connected cars” that recognize voice commands, a company executive said yesterday.
Samuel Shen (申元慶), chief operating officer at the Microsoft Asia-Pacific Research and Development Group, said the Redmond, Washington-based firm has developed a prototype of a connected car using the “Cortana” voice-recognition virtual assistant of the Windows 10 operating system.
The Cortana-connected prototype also has its windscreen integrated with a navigation system, allowing the virtual assistant to show the location of the driver’s nearby preferred locations on the windscreen or make restaurant reservations, he said.
“We have not launched similar products due to the high cost, but we hope to have further discussions with Taiwanese partners to jointly explore future possibilities,” Shen said during his opening keynote speech at the TechDays Taiwan developer conference in Taipei.
He did not mention the names of any potential partners, nor did he set up a timetable to develop Cortana-based connected cars.
Microsoft demonstrated its “Windows in the Car” concept in April last year — extending the functionality of a Windows Phone directly into a built-in car display — as its answer to Apple Inc’s “CarPlay.”
TechDays is an annual Microsoft industry event for software development, software architecture and IT solutions in Taiwan. This year’s conference attracted more than 3,000 IT professionals from nearly 1,000 firms.
The event includes sessions about the intelligent cloud platform, the Internet of Things suite with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, Windows servers and the commercial applications of the Windows 10 operating system.
Microsoft said that more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500 companies have at least one Microsoft enterprise cloud service.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS