Siri coming to select Ford vehicles

Siri Eyes-Free allows drivers to activate Siri with a long press of the voice recognition button on the steering wheel, similar activating Siri on an iPhone. Updating Sync doesn’t require owners of vehicles to go to the dealership; they simply download the update to a flash drive and plug it into the USB port inside their vehicles.

Over five million Fords sold worldwide since 2011 can now be updated to work with Siri on the iPhone.

“At the end of the day we don’t want to end up as the handset business”, Fields said in an April interview with Re/code. According to an announcement on the Ford website today, the update is available in all Sync-enabled cars made over the last four years. For instance, users can make phone calls, dictate text messages, get directions, look up points of interest, set reminders, and begin music playback.

But it has never quite lived up to the technical ability of Siri, and as a growing number of vehicle makers opt to install Apple CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto, instead of investing time and money on improving their own systems, Ford is beginning to follow suit.

“SYNC, Ford’s entertainment and communications system, was created to be flexible and updatable, just like other mobile technologies, so our customers are able to get the most out of their smartphones while behind the wheel”, Sherif Marakby, director of Ford’s electronics and electrical systems engineering department, wrote in a December 3 statement about the update.

The software update is available for vehicles equipped with second-generation Sync, also called MyFord Touch, for model years 2011 to 2016. Introduced this past summer, the third version already includes Siri Eyes-Free, which incorporates the voice-activated Siri digital assistant found in Apple’s iPhones.