Photo: Screen capture
Remember the Tamagotchi - those tiny devices you carried as a keychain that needed to be fed, petted, and played with unless they died? Well, aren't you glad they didn't catch on?
However, the non-existent pets may be gone, but that doesn't mean we're spared from interacting with fictional entities. At least not if you're the owner of a Tesla electric vehicle.
Considering we expect our cars to be smart enough to drive us wherever we need to go, it's not exactly too much to ask if we also wanted them to be able to carry a conversation. Let's not forget that we too learn how to talk before learning how to drive, so it makes sense.
Thanks to SmartCar, Tesla owners can now connect with their vehicles through a Facebook chatbot called TeslaBot. Or Elon. The namesake of the company's CEO is able to perform pretty much the same things that would have otherwise been done through Tesla's mobile app.
As weird as it might be to actually talk - using sentences - to your car, the TeslaBot does present a few advantages. First of all, it allows users to fiddle with their vehicle from other devices such as a desktop or a laptop. What's more, it can also be done using a very familiar interface, one that most of us have open at all times anyway.
Another plus would be the ability to give voice commands, even though it might be advisable to make sure there is no one around to hear you talk to your car. We know David Hasselhoff did it in Knight Rider Two Thousand and he was cool, but you can't always bet on what happens in the movies being reflected accordingly in real life.
But Tesla isn't the first to use SmartCar's services - the South Koreans from Hyundai already beat it to it for their Bluelink-enabled vehicles, which includes the Ioniq electric sedan. Since the platform is still relatively young, we expect other manufacturers to jump on board and help develop new features that will probably range from very useful to incredibly ridiculous.
Considering we expect our cars to be smart enough to drive us wherever we need to go, it's not exactly too much to ask if we also wanted them to be able to carry a conversation. Let's not forget that we too learn how to talk before learning how to drive, so it makes sense.
Thanks to SmartCar, Tesla owners can now connect with their vehicles through a Facebook chatbot called TeslaBot. Or Elon. The namesake of the company's CEO is able to perform pretty much the same things that would have otherwise been done through Tesla's mobile app.
As weird as it might be to actually talk - using sentences - to your car, the TeslaBot does present a few advantages. First of all, it allows users to fiddle with their vehicle from other devices such as a desktop or a laptop. What's more, it can also be done using a very familiar interface, one that most of us have open at all times anyway.
Another plus would be the ability to give voice commands, even though it might be advisable to make sure there is no one around to hear you talk to your car. We know David Hasselhoff did it in Knight Rider Two Thousand and he was cool, but you can't always bet on what happens in the movies being reflected accordingly in real life.
But Tesla isn't the first to use SmartCar's services - the South Koreans from Hyundai already beat it to it for their Bluelink-enabled vehicles, which includes the Ioniq electric sedan. Since the platform is still relatively young, we expect other manufacturers to jump on board and help develop new features that will probably range from very useful to incredibly ridiculous.
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