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Cadillac CUE Update Coming Soon

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#1 · (Edited)
Update adding features, improving performance.
www.GMInsideNews.com
February 5, 2013
By: Nick Saporito


Software updates are already a part of life for smartphone and PC users, but this societal norm is starting to gravitate to the vehicle as well. In the next few weeks Cadillac will roll out the first significant update to it’s Cadillac User Experience (CUE) infotainment system. The update is expected to provide stability enhancements to address complaints, as well as a few new features.

Most notable, the update is enabling Cadillac drivers to leverage their phone’s voice assistant via the steering wheel. For Apple iPhone users, this means that Siri will be able to be utilized through the car’s audio system. Apple calls this Siri “Eyes Free” meaning certain functions typically available through Siri—such as asking the meaning of life—will not work through CUE. The system will also work with other smartphone voice assistants so long as the phone is using a Bluetooth profile that’s loaded into the CUE system.

Additionally, the update will increase functionality to more media players through the USB port, and for the extremely popular Cadillac owners, CUE will download up to 3,500 phone contacts, up from today’s 1,000.

Cadillac says to expect an overall increase in CUE’s performance. Specifically, certain gestures on the touchscreen, and the capacitive touch button reaction times are to be improved with the update. The CUE system, not unlike other automakers’ infotainment systems, has come under scrutiny for being sluggish and buggy, which Cadillac states is feedback they've received and considered with this update.

Rounding out the updates is a mild reworking of the navigation functionality. While mapping data will remain the same, the system has been tweaked to display more street names, and the logic behind destination routing has been revamped.

Unlike some competitors, Cadillac is not having customers update their systems on their own. Instead, current CUE owners will receive a letter in early March informing them that they may voluntarily have their car updated at a dealership free of charge.

Once taking the vehicle to the dealership for the update, owners may opt to have a Cadillac loaner vehicle to drive while their car is receiving the update.

An ARM 11 3-core processor, with two of those processors dedicated to voice recognition, powers CUE. According to Cadillac the system also houses hardware that is currently not being used by the software, enabling the system to be “future proof” to a certain extent through future releases.

The extra hardware is likely to be utilized on the next update to CUE, which is allegedly going to enable app functionality on the system. GM recently released an API to developers to develop applications for CUE and the company’s other brand-specific infotainment systems. No timeline has been released regarding when customers and developers can expect applications to be ready for download.

Cadillac CUE is currently available on the 2013 ATS, SRX and XTS. All three vehicles will be eligible for the software update. Dealers are expected to receive the update and installation instructions later this month, with customer notification to follow after that.
 
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#5 · (Edited)
Never realized Voice recognition used 2 cores by itself. As a computer engineer it sounds like that's over kill. They could swap that arrangement and I doubt you would notice much difference in voice recognition performance but definitely more GUI performance

Edit: I would also suggest that they should move to an ARM 15 based core moving forward
 
#6 ·
Glad to hear there's an update coming. I'm upset that this POS was shipped in the first place. Anybody actually try to use it when they were testing the car? EVERY reviews I read and seen has bashed the CUE. Not one has been positive. What a shame.
 
#11 ·
I downloaded the CUE App and did all the "Advanced" features on the first try, except for 1-2 things.
It's really self explanatory.

But, if you're new to these types of multi-menu car systems or are unfamiliar with tablet interfaces, then I think you'll have a pretty steep learning curve.
 
#8 ·
I'm really interested to see what apps could be coming to the system.
 
#10 ·
I'm impressed that they're jumping on this immediately.

I can still remember the decade or so the auto industry required to figure out that CDs were the way music was being played.

This shows a significant shift in the thinking of the industry. They've always taken the view of "the design is frozen and we can't do squat 'til next year, or next major update." That they're doing this within months of introduction shows they've become a great deal more flexible.

Now if they'd just get more flexible with things like colors outside and colors and materials inside . . . .
 
#19 ·
Couldn't they just have put more powerful CPUs in there? If they know about the lag during design phase, they could have just put more processing power to hide the software lag.
 
#21 ·
The CUE system has been problematic for Cadillac. It caused several delays to the introduction of the new cars, and - much like the Ford system - has resulted in more than a few customer complaints and quality issues. Several of the people who led CUE development have been dismissed or reassigned as a result. This software update is the first of several in the works, and you can also look for a Gen 2 CUE that brings back a couple of buttons and knobs for certain functions. That will unfortunately take another year or two; in the meanwhile, the software changes will make it more user-friendly.
 
#22 ·
In regards to over the air charging, one of the biggest obstacles is maintaining a clean and constant power source at the vehicle. With the Tesla-- no problem--it's plugged in. If the battery dies or runs below threshold in a conventional vehicle mid program, you run the risk of component failure.

Most of the updates done on the latest incarnations of infotainment systems-- mylink, cue, etc. are being done at the dealers with dvd's in tandem with downloaded material to accommodate the multi-gig amount of data. Infrastructure and bandwidth is still not reliable enough yet across to permit "everything" being downloaded.

We'll get there.
 
#26 ·
A number of people do not care about the CUE in their cars and would not care for the update as it works fine as is, for the others they can get the update. As cars come in for service such as oil changes when needed the service department will update the software in an orderly manner.
 
#32 ·
Folks,

Updating a piece of software in a car over a satellite link (low bandwidths probably) that doesn't stay on all the time makes for a very long and uncontrolled rollout of this thing. I'm sure the software probably hasn't been build to deal with these kind of conditions and provides GM with an opportunity to get a sense of the following:

* overall status of the car that is not available via OnStar
* usage statistics of CUE and other things within the car
* ensure lease vehicle's maintenance is being followed

I don't know if any of these were being thought about by GM as a part of the decision, but, I suspect a combination of their inability to deal with the dynamic nature of a car's use was the main reason for being it in instead...
 
#35 ·
handing.
Probably. Or the foundation of CUE is really "massive." Which makes me wonder just how "massive" is "massive?" OR.... GM hasn't built in this level of push-update into CUE, which can only handle more minor updates?? Or GM (and others) haven't really found a way to perform a "massive" update over air because a car will need to remain powered in order to do it?
I think there's something here.

But even getting the update from a computer and plugging it into a USB port would work too!


As one who works on these cars in service, I can not tell you how overdue this is. We have been promised this since mid-January but, they keep pushing it back. I have been on the phone with our contacts thru service and the fixes are many, upwards or 1500 different issues with many devices. The massive update is going to be something like 15 HOURS of us reprogramming and wiping the hard drive from the unit, right now reprograms are in the neighborhood of 1-2 GB, this should be about 10-20 times that. Also many new vehicles already hitting dealerships have upgraded software from the launch of CUE, but I dont't think it is what exactly is being discussed here.
 
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