Chery is teaching their cars & robots to… speak Malay?!

One of the coolest things in modern cars today is voice command systems. You don’t have to tekan-tekan buttons like you’re playing Tekken while driving anymore. Just say, “lower the window,” and the car actually does it. Only, you gotta say it in English.

Try saying, “Eh bro, aircond sejuk sangat la,” and the car will just freeze like you when you enter a cinema without a sweater. Total vibe killer.

  So which brands actually understand Bahasa Melayu?

Honestly? None of the major ones do… yet. For now, only Proton has officially announcedthat Malay voice commands are coming soon.

But when we were test-driving the Jaecoo J5 in China recently, something got us real excited. Turns out, Chery (the parent company of JAECOO and OMODA) is actively training their AI to understand and speak Malay. Yeppp, a Chinese car brand trying to be Malaysian-friendly!

  Lion Intelligent Cabin by Chery: Just say it, and it does it

Chery’s running this thing called the Lion Intelligent Cabin — basically, a smart voice system that lets you control the car just by talking to it. For example:

This system is fueled by their collaboration with a Chinese AI company called DeepSeek,which specialises in developing large language models (LLM). With DeepSeek’s tech, the system can:

Pretty soon, it won’t just follow instructions, it’ll predict what you want before you even ask. Wild.

The same AI model is also being used in Chery’s Aimoga robots, which is already being rolled out in Malaysian showrooms to serve customers.

Here’s the best part – the Lion Intelligent Cabin system is being trained to understand multiple languages, not just English. And since Chery is eyeing the ASEAN market, they’re working hard to make sure their AI can pick up how we actually speak here.

  To help the AI learn Malay, they need 1,000 voices!

At their HQ in Wuhu, China, we were invited to record our voices for the AI, which will be helpful in training it to understand Malay. To start training a language, they need:

And they don’t just want formal Bahasa Melayu, they want real-life slang too. KL-style, Kedah accent, rempit mode… all welcome.

So yeah, during our session, we were asked to say a mix of everything from “Matikan penghawa dingin” to “Bukak ekon sikit”.

  So… will Chery cars and robots be able understand regional accents?

As long as they get enough data and samples from all kinds of speakers, this is definitely a possibility. The more recordings they get, the faster the AI can learn to understand us.

We’re totally hoping one day their system will understand regional accents like Klate, Utagha, Sabah and all the beautiful chaos that is our Malaysian way of speaking. But at the very least, it’s gonna be able to follow basic Malay commands soon.

Wanna see how far Chery takes this BM-friendly tech? Stay tuned! The future where your car actually understands you might be rolling in faster than you think. ????

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