Say “Hey Peregrine, get directions to Denver,” and Godwit plans the route. Ask it to call someone or send a text and it does that too. What it never does is send your voice anywhere. Every word is heard, understood and answered right there on the dash.
Why that matters out here
Most voice assistants record you, send the clip off to a company's servers to work out what you meant, and wait for the answer to come back. Lose the signal and they stop listening. Godwit's assistant has no server to wait on, so it keeps working on the forest road with no bars, and nothing you say ends up in somebody else's database. Your vehicle, your data.
It answers to the same name as Peregrine, the TrailCurrent voice assistant, and listens for it with Peregrine's own trained wake word. If you would rather it did not listen at all, one switch in Settings turns it off.
What you can ask for
- Directions to a place, or to a friend's house when their address is in your phone's contacts.
- A call to anyone in your contacts, by name or by number.
- A text. Godwit reads it back and waits for your yes before it sends.
- Your music, by artist, album or song.
Also new on the bench
The knobs got new faces. Short words gave way to icons, and volume now shows as a scale that widens from left to right, so you can read it with a glance.
The climate screen was redrawn to match the knobs, ready for the day Godwit is wired to the vehicle's own heat and air.
Your music has a home on the head unit now. Copy songs over from a USB stick and browse them by album and artist, covers and all, with no account and no signal.
And the map has a proper night look, darker and easier on your eyes in the cab after sundown.
What the video gets into
Why streaming music on a head unit you build yourself is harder than it sounds. Then the questions people asked most after episode one: will Godwit fit a single DIN or a double DIN dash, will the series cover the software, and where does the map data come from? It closes with what was next on the list, including a radio tuner and GPX tracks for overlanders.
Those two did not stay on the list for long. They arrived in the very next episode: Offline Trails and a Radio That Hears the Sky.
Try it, then follow along
The Godwit page still lets you drive the head unit in your browser, knobs and all. The voice assistant is not part of that demo, so the video is the place to hear it.
Godwit is demonstration and test software. It runs on the bench and is still under development. Do not install it in a vehicle you drive.
The Godwit source is free and MIT licensed, like the rest of TrailCurrent. New episodes go up on the open source channel. What would you ask your dash for? Tell us in the video comments.