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      10-18-2018, 05:19 PM   #8
Law
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Drives: E90 M3 6MT
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2011.5 BMW M3  [10.00]
2004 BMW M3  [10.00]
Is the Intelligent Personal Assistant superfluous? Absolutely.
It's not necessary for driving.

But...having this technology on hand doesn't present an impediment to the driving experience whatsoever.
Should one decide to never use it, the fact that the feature is available doesn't do anything to damage the driving dynamics of the car.

Surely, this technology is still in its early adoption stage and will probably take several generations to refine.

Remember when the iDrive system debuted on the E65 7 Series?
It was unnecessarily complex with many functions & menus that were utterly useless/redundant to the driver.

Fast forward to the 2010s and iDrive became the gold standard, the most intuitive and advanced infotainment system in the market, to the point where competitors ditched their joystick, hard-plastic button interfaces and adopted control systems more or less inspired by the iDrive controller and menus system.

So while it is true that these technologies don't necessary make any BMW a better drivers' car per-se, and few people would actually be using this on a constant/daily basis at its current stage, it's safe to say BMW is looking at the bigger picture with this technology, with autonomous vehicles being a thing of the future.
The lessons learned now with Siri, Alexa, Hey BMW, etc. are going to be valuable technological bases to build from in future implementations.

As enthusiasts, the Intelligent Personal Assistant is probably the feature we care the least about and most of us will seldom use it after the novelty wears off (kind of like Siri, everybody messed with it for fun & laughs, but overall people don't rely on Siri as much as Apple would've liked).
So again, as long as the rest of the car does what it's supposed to do, the addition of the feature (even if largely irrelevant to the act of driving) itself poses no threat to the driving experience.
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