Having tried handwriting recognition in Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz vehicles over the past several years, I’ve always regarded the feature as a novelty rather than a necessity. For me, it ranks below voice recognition in effectiveness when entering a navigation address or phone number into a car’s infotainment system.
The handwriting recognition systems I’ve tested in the past often mistake a 5 for an S or a D for a P and are painstakingly slow since the user needs to input one character at a time. But as the first automaker to add handwriting recognition in the 2011 A8, Audi is also the first to get the feature right in the latest version of its flagship sedan.
I recently had an opportunity to try the feature and the latest MMI Touch infotainment system in the 2019 Audi A8 and spoke with Anthony Foulk, the product manager for the car. One reason the handwriting recognition feature in the all-new A8 has improved is that it’s no longer confined to a small touchpad or center-console controller, as in BMW and Mercedes vehicles.
The 2019 Audi A8’s third-generation MMI Touch infotainment interface does away with a center console controller and touchpad in favor of two in-dash touchscreens. “The top screen is for the infotainment and has haptic feedback built into it,” Foulk explained. “The lower screen is really a control panel and is for HVAC, seating controls, handwriting recognition and things like that.”
Because characters for the handwriting recognition feature are traced on the bottom screen instead of on a small touchpad as before, it allows for other less restrictive input parameters. “It used to be you had to write in block letters one letter at a time until it showed up or the system gave you audible feedback,” Foulk noted. “Now you can just write on top of each letter or you can write from left to right if that’s more natural. And it’s really fast.”
It was impressively fast and easy to use in my demo. I quickly scribbled “Starbucks” on the lower screen, one character on top of the other, and the MMI Touch’s handwriting recognition figured it out. It also worked near flawlessly when I wrote in other commands such as addresses and phone numbers.
The idea behind the new MMI Touch infotainment interface was “to make it easier to use, more simplistic, more intuitive and to clean it all up,” Foulk said. “Automotive interiors are getting a bit overwhelming and the whole idea with this is to boil it down to a system that you understand how to use, yet is flexible depending on what function you want to access.”
With this approach, Audi has succeeded in turning an infotainment feature that is a questionable me-too feature on luxury vehicles into one that’s useful and could eventually trickle down into mainstream cars – unlike, say, the BMW 7 Series’ Gentleman Function.
