Giving self-driving cars personality - Tech News The Star Online

Sure, the Google self-driving cars cruising around Mountain View, California and the Uber fleet expected to roll out any day now in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania are expected to stop at red lights, avoid pedestrians and obey speed limits. Mountain View startup Drive.ai, which unveiled its technology recently, wants to focus on that aspect of self-driving cars. The company's artificial intelligence system uses software and hardware to make autonomous vehicles smarter, enabling them to not only navigate obstacles, but also to communicate both with people inside and outside the car. "Vehicles of the future will communicate transparently with us," co-founder and president Carol Reiley wrote in a news release, "they'll have personality, and they'll make us feel welcome and safe, even without a human driver." To that end, the startup plans to sell self-driving kits that include some sort of communication device that can be mounted on a car's roof.