Toyota will offer Alexa in its cars starting later this year

Toyota announced at CES this year that the carmaker will be offering support for Amazon Alexa within its vehicles – no additional hardware required. There’s a lot of third-party devices out there that are putting Alexa on your dashboard as an aftermarket add-on, but Toyota is one of the first automakers to fully embrace loading their vehicles up with Amazon’s voice-powered smart assistant.

Toyota said on Tuesday that it will be deploying Alexa beginning with its Entune 3.0 App Suite and Lexus Enform App Suite 2.0 vehicle system software updates for select 2018 model year vehicles later in 2018, giving U.S. customers access to Alexa while on the go. Other models will also get Alexa support beginning in 2019.

The Alexa skill set supported by the in-car systems will be fairly feature-complete, allowing drivers to do things like get news updates, control the infotainment system, build shopping and to-do lists and even control connected smart home devices, so they can do stuff like remotely set the temperature to get the house ready for their arrival, or open the garage door with a voice command.

Ford announced plans to begin testing Alexa in cars at CES last year, and BMW previously announced plans to begin adding Alexa support to its model lineup last September.