Overview
Ford president and CEO, Alan Mulally, and Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates, announced the partnership between Ford and Microsoft at the annual North American International Auto Show in January 2007.
The Ford SYNC technology was promoted as a new product that provided drivers with the ability to operate Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone and digital media players in their vehicles using voice commands, the vehicle's steering wheel, or radio controls. A further SYNC capability was also revealed, in which the text messages received by the user are "vocalized" by a digitized female voice device named "Samantha". Included as another feature of its text message function, SYNC also interprets approximately one hundred shorthand messages, such as "LOL", and will read "swear words" (it does not decipher acronyms that have been considered by the designers to be "obscene").
In 2007, as a standalone option, the suggested retail price for the SYNC was US$395.
Read more about this topic: Ford Sync