Mercedes-Benz, Liquid AI Partner To Improve, Streamline Future In-Car Voice Command Capabilities 

As interactions with our vehicles become more complex, Mercedes-Benz is continually looking for ways to make them simple, straightforward, and even elegant. Thus, Mercedes-Benz of Plano is pleased to announce that Mercedes-Benz has entered into a long-term partnership with Liquid AI to develop and embed artificial intelligence tools into Mercedes-Benz models equipped with third- and fourth-generation MBUX systems in North America.  

A few decades ago, this would have made little sense, as – aside from the basic driving controls – our interaction with vehicles didn’t extend much beyond adjusting the temperature and choosing a radio station.  Today, we are asking the car to find a route to an address, or sometimes just a business name or point of interest.  We may also ask the vehicle to find a single song among thousands stored in the car, phone or retrieved from a streaming app’s database.  Voice recognition systems have been the shortcut for this kind of interaction, but it has often been a spotty affair, with many systems having difficulty with accents, pronunciations, and plain common speech.

With the assistance of Liquid AI, Mercedes-Benz plans to make its MBUX systems more effective at seamlessly integrating voice control, vehicle functionality, and contextual understanding to improve the in-vehicle experience. 

“With this strategic collaboration, we’re scaling embedded intelligence in the vehicle and improving AI speech capabilities for our customers in North America,” said Jörg Burzer, Mercedes-Benz AG’s Chief Technology Officer, Development & Procurement. “By advancing on-device speech, language understanding and reasoning with Liquid AI, we’re laying the foundation for the next generation of intuitive and multimodal in-car experiences, with a clear path toward initial production deployment as early as the second half of 2026.”  

Mercedes-Benz plans to use the partnership to create a smooth, customer-friendly experience across speech, language understanding, and reasoning. Liquid AI has deep expertise in creating efficient, lightweight foundation models designed for specific systems. By processing speech locally, rather than referring to a cloud database, the system promises to be more reliable and provide a familiar experience during everyday drives. Liquid AI’s models enable natural, conversational interactions without constant data exchange with the cloud, making the experience seamless and more personal.  

“The software-defined vehicle is one of the most consequential deployments of AI in the physical world, and Mercedes‑Benz has approached it with exactly the rigor it demands,” notes Ramin Hasani, CEO of Liquid AI. “Working across in-car intelligence, we’re building infrastructure and not just a feature. Liquid’s models are built to run on the hardware already inside the vehicle, delivering intelligence that is fast, private, and sovereign without depending on the cloud. Mercedes‑Benz’s conviction that this is the right approach to vehicle AI matches our own.”  

The partnership enhances existing cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) and computing ecosystems by integrating efficient embedded intelligence directly into Mercedes-Benz vehicles with third- and fourth-generation MBUX in North America. Beyond those MBUX systems, Mercedes-Benz and Liquid AI will continue to collaborate to discover even more ways to develop innovative enhancements for future modes.   

In the near future, when you visit Mercedes-Benz of Plano and find models with greater sophistication yet each easier to use than ever before, you will have an idea of how it happened.