Lucid ditched Alexa, aiming for the EV core with a new voice assistant

• Lucid's new voice assistant includes natural language interaction
• SoundHound's technology does not rely entirely on a mobile connection
• Already available on Air, coming soon to Gravity

Lucid wants you to have a conversation with your Air or Gravity electric vehicle, and it goes beyond the necessary wake-up call of “Hey Lucid.”

Earlier this month I sat in the passenger seat of Air, while the pilot asked: “My friend suggested I check out the NFL stadium while I was in Vegas; what's up?”

The artificial voice answered in a split second: “The NFL stadium in Vegas is called Allegiant Stadium. It's very cool.”

“Navigate there,” said my roommate.

The voice finally confirmed, “Walking around Allegiant stadium. Follow the road.”

In the driver's seat leading me to Lucid Assistant by voice was Kyle Halstvedt, the technical program manager at SoundHound who helped put this together. a completely new voice assistant for Lucid EVs.

With SoundHound's voice- and AI-focused team based in Santa Clara, California, near Lucid's headquarters in Newark, the companies worked closely on the project. Halstvedt intended to show me that all voice queries now have more flexibility, and voice functionality now fully adapts to Lucid's needs—as a requirement find the fastest chargers on the goplan the route of the EV, and place its battery in advance to be prepared.

Here it's especially important that this functionality navigates to the minimum—because for Lucid it can be the difference between some of the fastest EV chargers in the world compared to the equivalent.

“That was the fun part of this project, that they wanted to drive things with their navigation system,” Halstvedt said. “We don't just use a different data provider; we are deeply integrated into their navigation system, and that had to happen.”

Halstvedt noted that it's something SoundHound has experience doing before, and it's something Lucid had a specific requirement for around the project and integration. “They appreciated the flexibility of our technical team to create the information they wanted, something that required a little creativity on the technical side,” he said.

Way more flexible, better than Alexa

Lucid Assistant has been released since September, replacing Alexa as part of Lucid UX 2.4 software update. According to Lucid, all Air models in North America and the Middle East now have access to it. Early Gravity models don't yet have Lucid assistant, but they will soon, the automaker told Green Car Reports.

The new assistant, which can already be configured in six languages, will now better handle navigation and audio, climate control features, or heated seats—all the basics that owners found challenging before. But that is just the beginning.

Lucid made a smart decision about where it wants its core capabilities, and the voice is in the middle of it, Lucid Motors head of user experience Dave Flint explained to Green Car Reports in November, when that program was still going live. “It's not just, I'm ordering a car; like, how does the car start communicating with me by voice?”

“That wouldn't have happened with our old system,” Flint summed up bluntly.

Alexa wasn't working for Lucid, and Lucid didn't talk about it—though there were probably a lot of hashed driver names. The California EV maker announced back in 2020 that it would use an advanced version of Amazon Alexa to access a range of vehicle functions from minor repairs to finding charging stations, and touching smart home controls. But what owners were finding out in the real world was that such commands inside the car depended heavily on a strong data connection; account permissions and other features may interfere; and ultimately Lucid didn't have much control over how well it all worked in the real world.

Context is everything in Lucid's new assistant

“What we need to do a good job, in terms of natural language commands, is the surrounding context—whether that's conversation history, information about the natural world, or the position, where the user is,” Halstvedt said.

Consumers expect to be able to have an extended conversation about a location or series of locations, filter them repeatedly, and then want to be able to take action based on the collected results, he said. But few new cars can deliver that even in full connectivity.

SoundHound hasn't ignored the amazing smoothness of AI-based questions and chatbots, but it understands that this way more is needed from the car—and it needs to pair some of those benefits with the car's standard voice processing.

“If you just plug the OpenAI APIs into your car it will do a great job of talking but not a really good job of simulating,” Halstvedt said. “We want to bring that energy together.”

To do that, the voice assistant runs on the fact that that it will not always have a mobile connection out on the street. In what SoundHound calls a native hybrid model, it streams audio to servers or an embedded local engine, balancing that in any way that makes sense.

“Besides the voice we send, we also send a set of data that we call request information, which represents all the different attributes, such as location, time zone, and so on,” said Halstvedt. “That's an important factor in answering these questions.”

A few “hallucinations”, voluntary connections

This method also reduces the likelihood of so-called “AI hallucinations,” according to SoundHound—shocking or strange responses that seem unrelated to what was asked.

While it can easily support those complex natural conversational questions, it can, as Halstvedt puts it, “Work well without communication,” and provide some degree of mutual experience.

As an example of something that needs to capture nuance but doesn't need connection, he said, “It's a little hot in here.”

“A temperature drop of two degrees Fahrenheit,” answered the voice.

“If we have cloud connectivity we can enhance those results with better results from the cloud and really mix various AI features that generate voice except that it is more expensive from a computing point of view,” added Halstvedt.

But in Lucid's new approach, it also draws on SoundHound's nearly 20 years of work in understanding natural language commands without access to a large language model built into generative AI.

Lucid's voice assistant knows the owner's manual

Compared to previous voice commands, SoundHound brings new features, including what it calls vehicle intelligence—meaning “relevant and valid information about all the features the car supports, such as where things are and what buttons do,” it explained in a recent statement. press release in the feature set.

SoundHound has worked with other automakers, but points to Lucid's automotive intelligence questions as this integration covers new territory for natural language and AI. Everything The owner's manual is available by voiceand the system can evaluate it based on your questions—even if you can only describe icons, symbols, or warning lights.

“We used computer vision techniques to allow symbols to be defined in the car's manual… to make information about the car more accessible at times when the user might need to access it,” Halstvedt said.

Voice controls in 2025 Lucid Gravity

The hybrid model also made the sound system easier for Lucid to adapt and customize as Wind and Gravity change and vary between trim levels. Operations management teams can change the way something works in the cloud almost immediately, local/native backups changed soon after an update.

“We invest a lot in voice; it's going to be an important UX for us, with a lot of impact in terms of what it means for natural language interaction and natural language interaction in the car,” said Flint.

Indeed, in its 2025 Lucid Gravity SUV, with an improved interface, the automaker offers digital detox mode with small displaysand there's a set of mood-and-ambience modes called Vibes. As Flint suggests, be prepared for voice controls to continue to take center stage there and beyond.

And among all of today's AI ideas, realizing that digital detox in the form of voice can also help drivers stay focused on what's important.