Ford wants to show in-car ads and listen to your conversation

When not working to put holographic dogs around your car, Ford is also working on technology to show in-car advertising based on your user behaviour, location and speed.

By listening to the chat you might be having with your passengers (or perhaps with yourself), the system would know to not interrupt with personalised adverts, spoken as well as shown on the car’s displays.

The patent application was filed last year and published recently, and it's all to do with ‘maximising revenue opportunities’ for Ford (but of course). Naturally, there’s lots of personalisation.

How personal? The examples given describe how it might target you if you were going shopping, in a shopping centre car park (because location’s relevant), and how it might play more ads at lower speeds (when you’re stuck in traffic) and perhaps only appearing every 10 minutes if you’re on a motorway.

Other sources to serve contextual ads include using your previous mobile history (a bit creepy), or historical behaviour (a bit stalky). In all this talk of target practice, fortunately, Ford recognise some users might want to turn it all down, or better still, completely off.

Safety concerns? We’re assured there’s no reason to be worried as such tech-based ads would be done in compliance with local regs, and the system would be configured to make sure the feature can be disabled when it’s not safe. Ford also wants to steer clear of visual ads when the motor is moving. Phew.

It reckons the system would be intelligent enough to be able to work out how and when you wanted to engage, how long ads should be at any given time and when it was appropriate to suspend the service without you insisting.

And of course, it’s going to be doing its fair share of data collection and analysis. That’ll help the brand cleverly manage, for example, the best time to serve ads to you. One can only presume you’ll have to pay a subscription for the low-fat, ad-free version, mind. Can't see that being cheap – better start saving now...