Earlier this year, Trend Hunter covered the initial release of Ford Sync, and we were excited about the prospect to fully integrate a music player, phone and navigation system with a car’s audio and voice recognition system.  The technology will be available in select Ford vehicles later this year.

Say, “Play Artist Black Eyed Peas,” and Ford Sync will cue up the Peas in your iPod, Zune or even USB drive.  “Dial Mom,” and Ford Sync will use your bluetooth enabled phone to ring your mother.  This is the magic of Ford Sync’s revolutionary new technology, developed in partnership with Microsoft.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiUiJaIlLRg] 

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The author had a chance to spend an hour or so reviewing the system with Mark Schirmer from Ford Communications.  In short, he was incredibly impressed.

The speach recognition was much better than I expected.  Ford Sync was easily able to pick out my voice as I beckoned the system to play my favorite music and randomly call people in Mark’s phone.

Finding music among thousands of mp3s was made simple.  For context, I currently use a high end Alpine receiver to dial through my iPod… and I hate it.  In contrast, this system was fast and easy.

The integraion with the phone was seamless.  Ford Sync wirlessly read Mark’s phone, pulling up his address book, recent call list and text messages onto the car’s display screen.  When a new text message arrived, the car read the message aloud.  It even knew to read words like ‘LOL’ as ‘Laughing Out Loud’. 

Unfortunately, the speach recognition can not write your text messages, but a menu of a dozen common replies does pop up for you to respond with the click of a button.

To read the rest of this review  visit Trend Hunter