GDLS Teams With Primordial Labs On AI Voice Control For M1, XM30 And Other Combat Vehicles

General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) has partnered with Primordial Labs to bring AI voice control to its combat vehicles, from the M1 tank to the next-generation XM30. The companies planned to announce the arrangement on Oct. 7, according to Breaking Defense.

The system is called Anura. Primordial built it to work on any platform and to adapt to any type of vehicle, co-founder Lee Ritholz told the outlet. The startup is also developing AI assistance for Army helicopter crews and is best known for demonstrations involving small drones. Ritholz said the company is used to running everything on a very small processor, so larger platforms offer something close to a luxury by comparison.

The pairing joins a heavy-vehicle manufacturer that has built the M1 for more than 40 years with a young AI company. It comes just days before the annual AUSA trade show.

GDLS officials said voice control could help soldiers who are increasingly overloaded as they manage a growing set of complex systems, including tactical data networks and AI target recognition. Salem Auclair, a 20-year Army veteran who helped write the official XM30 requirements before joining Primordial, said a lot of technology is being pushed onto soldiers. He argued that voice is a natural way to help them use it, since the vehicles are driven by the same 18- to 22-year-old soldiers as today.

The XM30 program, in which GDLS competes against American Rheinmetall, calls for a crew of two, down from three on the M2 Bradley, while adding more technology. Geoff Norman, GDLS director of strategy and a retired Army general who worked on the next-generation vehicle program, said flipping switches, pressing buttons and typing on keyboards in a combat vehicle will be hard in the future. He pointed to moving vehicles, darkness and bad weather, and to the fact that a smaller crew will have to do those tasks.

Anura does not use generative AI, the type of chatbot technology that has shaken up the world since ChatGPT launched. The system cannot hallucinate because it does not generate content. He said it instead relies on narrower, more predictable forms of machine learning that translate a soldier's voice commands into inputs for complex military interfaces that are often hard to use.

Norman said Anura is not installed on the current XM30 prototypes that the Army is testing. GDLS aims to offer it on future upgrades to the XM30 and on legacy vehicles such as the M1 tank and the Stryker troop carrier.