Rivian debuted a new AI assistant this week, and it brings welcome relief to Apple CarPlay and Android Auto lovers who went cold turkey on their favorite dash tech since switching to one of the company’s swanky electric cars.
Rivian is one of several automakers that chose to build its own car tech from the ground up. Tesla has also avoided third-party interfaces (for now), as has General Motors. But for many people, life without CarPlay or Android Auto is a dealbreaker.
Turns out, there is a middle ground. The new Rivian Assistant can do things like read and respond to texts, from both iOS and Android devices. This was a highly requested feature from the Rivian community, according to Wassym Bensaid, Rivian’s chief product officer, who spoke on stage at the company’s first annual Autonomy and AI day in Palo Alto, California, on Thursday.
The Rivian Assistant will begin rolling out in early 2026. It’s built on multiple large language models and is part of the larger Rivian Unified Intelligence system, the company says. Happily, it will work on all Rivian vehicles no matter when you bought it, including first- and second-generation operating systems, as well as the more affordable R2 when it debuts later in 2026.
Rivian Assistant (Credit: Rivian)
While I’m typically a little suspicious of in-car voice assistants, this one was impressive in the live demo. A Rivian product manager noted you can activate the system by pressing a button on the steering wheel, or saying, “Hey, Rivian.” He asked it to read his recent messages. The screen pulled one up so he could read it, speak a response out loud, and send it.
As an example of a more advanced feature, he asked for a nearby restaurant, which the AI located and showed on the dash screen maps. “Send my friend the restaurant and my ETA,” the product manager said. The vehicle did it, demonstrating integration with the driver’s phone and vehicle routing system.
“The assistant has memory, context, and the full story, and it puts everything into a perfect message,” Bensaid added. (I’m unlikely to go blindly drive to a restaurant without looking at the menu, but that’s not the point.)
The Rivian Assistant also integrates with your Google Calendar, something the two companies worked together to enable, Bensaid says. In the demo, the driver asked, “What’s on my calendar today?” It took two tries to go through—a common problem that has turned me against in-car voice assistants in the past—but when it worked, it seemed helpful.
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The dash screen showed two meetings that day. “Can you move my call with Tim to 5pm?” the driver said. It appeared to go through, offering a truly hands-free way to manage your calendar on-the-go. The driver then asked it to drive to their next meeting. It read the location from the meeting invite, and routed the car there.
“Google Calendar is just the beginning. The platform will expand to many more applications and many more third party agents as they become available,” Bensaid says.
“How much battery will I have when I get to my destination?” was the next question, intended to show how the voice assistant not only knows what’s on your phone or in maps, but also how the car is doing. The car indicated that the battery was a bit low, so the driver asked to switch to a more efficient drive mode, and the AI flipped the car from “All-Purpose” driving to “Conserve” mode.
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This goes beyond what Apple CarPlay or Android Auto can do. In another example, the driver asked to turn on all the seat warmers besides the one in the driver’s seat. The dash screen then showed all of them were activated, except his.
“The assistant takes the vehicle experience to the next level,” Bensaid says. “Instead of having multiple UI commands, multiple tabs on the touch screen, you can perform the whole task with just one natural language command.”
The assistant will also power “predictive maintenance” for the vehicle “by embedding AI into diagnostics,” Rivian says. “It’s an expert assistant for technicians, scanning telemetry and history to pinpointing complex issues.”
Also at the event, Rivian debuted a custom-built silicon chip for its autonomous driving platform, called its first-generation Rivian Autonomy Processor (RAP1). It also announced it would be adding LiDAR to its self-driving systems, noting that cameras alone are not enough in poor lighting conditions—a subtle dig toward Tesla’s cameras-only strategy.
You can watch the full presentation here.
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