SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 24 Alphabets Google is providing key capabilities for an artificial intelligence assistant for Volkswagen drivers in a smartphone app, part of Google39;s strategy to win business by offering tools to build enterprise AI applications.

Consumers can ask Volkswagen39;s inapp assistant questions like How do I change a flat tire? or point their phone cameras at vehicle dashboards to receive relevant information.

The AI assistant draws on Google39;s Gemini large language models, programs that can understand and generate predictive responses to human language, and cloud computing capacity.

The VW tool was designed by adding data such as Volkswagen owners manuals and YouTube videos on vehicle maintenance to Gemini.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Reuters that the product required overcoming technical hurdles to multimodality, the ability to process different data types such as text, images and videos.

The problem looks superficially simple, but its technically very complex, Kurian said. Most people think what we built is a speechtotext translation system that then looks up a manual. Absolutely not.

The AI assistant is free and available to about 120,000 owners of Volkswagens Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport models. It will roll out by early next year to other cars from model year 2020 and later.

Corporate adoption of generative AI could alter the lucrative cloud computing market, where Google places third in terms of market share behind Amazon and…