General Motors is adding a personal AI assistant to OnStar as part of a broader makeover of the subscription-based connected car service that the U.S. automaker launched 30 years ago.
The OnStar AI Assistant will debut in the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq EV in the coming months, with more GM vehicles to follow, the company said Wednesday at its GM Forward event in New York, where it made a series of other technology announcements. The company said it will launch a new OnStar mobile app in 2027 that will complement and sync up with its in-car software.
The new OnStar mobile app will replace the current OnStar Guardian app that launched in 2020 as well as vehicle brand apps for Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC.
This tech-centric reboot is unlike other attempts to modernize OnStar and it notably puts agentic AI at the center. The company has updated the safety and roadside assistance service numerous times in its history, especially in the past five years as it tried to stay apace of emerging and tech-forward competitors like Tesla.
In 2021, the company expanded its OnStar Guardian app, which offered crash detection, emergency assistance and location sharing, to anyone with a compatible phone, even if they didn’t own a GM vehicle. A year later, GM started using Google Cloud’s conversational AI Dialogflow to recognize specific spoken requests and expanded in 2023 to give drivers responses to common queries like routing and navigation assistance — all part of GM’s plan to build a$25 billion subscription business by 2030.
GM continued to focus on generative AI, but relied on Google to provide the experience. The company said last year that Google Gemini would roll out in vehicles in 2026.
The OnStar AI Assistant is an in-house effort and one aimed at giving the driver and passengers an interactive and custom experience — and become even more embedded in their daily lives.
“OnStar is now transitioning to be a connected intelligence platform, not just the call center that it’s historically been known as, but a mechanism for interpreting, understanding, and providing predictive, proactive support to its owners,” GM’s chief product officer Sterling Anderson told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the GM Forward event.
For instance, cameras on the vehicle will be connected to the software to offer live views as well as crash and safety recordings. Users can set up the connected cameras to turn on automatically if the vehicle senses an impending event — for instance an aggressive horn honk — then capture the event and upload it to the OnStar app. Users will be able to use voice to control certain functions on the vehicle, including climate, and ask questions about any specific vehicle feature.
The launch coincides with efforts throughout the auto industry to stay apace of Chinese automakers with technology that is central to the vehicle — and no longer a slapped on gimmick or feature. But that has required GM to change its approach to software development, adopt AI tools, and even design a new electrical and centralized compute vehicle architecture.
The announcement also comes after GM has been criticized and even fined for sharing data with third parties. The company said customers will have the ability to decide what data is shared, and that the recordings have time limits and are encrypted. GM said it and OnStar cannot access Connected Camera recordings.
Source: techcrunch.com
