Mercedes-Benz and Google Cloud are expanding their strategic partnership to introduce new conversational capabilities to the MBUX Virtual Assistant, powered by Google Cloud’s new Automotive AI Agent. Built using Gemini on Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s Automotive AI Agent is specially tailored for the automotive industry and can reference information from Google Maps Platform to give users more detailed and personalized conversational responses about navigation, points of interest and more.

Google Maps Platform provides Mercedes-Benz owners with information about 250 million places around the world; the map is updated more than 100 million times each day. With the enhanced search and navigation experience, users can converse naturally with the MBUX Virtual Assistant. The new experience will be available in the MBUX Virtual Assistant, with the new Mercedes-Benz CLA.

The CLA will be the first vehicle designed with the new Mercedes-Benz operating system, MB.OS. A rollout to further models with the MBUX Voice Assistant is also planned.

Google Cloud’s Automotive AI Agent will also enable the MBUX Virtual Assistant to handle complex, multi-turn dialog and can retain memory of conversations, which means users can continue conversations and reference information throughout their drives.

Google Cloud’s Automotive AI Agent enables automakers to leverage the power of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to build and deploy customized, first-party, voice assistant experiences with state-of-the-art AI quality. Automotive AI Agent was built using Google’s Gemini models, which enables multimodal reasoning capabilities through natural language speech interactions and uses information from Google Maps Platform.