Ford Mustang's Sync 3 system learns Chinese
Ford's infotainment system adds Chinese handwriting recognition to its bag of tricks.
The Ford Mustang has quickly become China's best selling sports car, since being introduced there for the 2015 model year. To better cater to the market, Ford has upgraded the Mustang's Sync 3 infotainment system to understand handwritten Chinese characters.
In addition to Sync 3 being able to recognize Mandarin Chinese voice commands, the 8-inch center touchscreen lets you write in desired destinations, points of interest and search for music. Handwriting recognition replaces Sync's previous method of inputting Chinese characters, which required typing in phonetic spellings of words, which was time consuming and cumbersome.
Sync 3's handwriting recognition can decipher the more than 2,500 characters in the Chinese language and account for a wide variety of writing styles and habits to improve search efficiency and accuracy. The system can also understand characters written at angles of up to 15 degrees, which is good news for people with less-than-stellar penmanship.
The Chinese handwriting feature won't just be kept to the Mustang's Sync system, though. Ford will also be offering it in Focus, Taurus, Edge, Kuga and Explorer models sold in China.
