App that diagnoses your car is only the beginning

Your car’s engine is constantly speaking. Thankfully, Josh Siegel at MIT developed a smartphone app to translate.

“It uses the microphone built into your smartphone and listens to your vehicle and then we apply artificial intelligence to determine what exactly is wrong with your car,” he explained.

Josh’s app can tell the difference between two Kia engines, one that is getting incomplete combustion in one of the cylinders.

I can’t tell any difference, but Josh’s app, which he calls “Data Driven,” can. It’s like Shazam for engines. It recognizes the sound of a misfiring cylinder, a struggling air filter, or a tire that’s about to fail.

And this is just the beginning.

I expect a similar app could also monitor lawnmowers, dishwashers, refrigerators. And maybe, one day, those noises your knees make after a certain age.

Of course, amazing as it is that a phone can tell when an engine needs a tune-up, only a human being can hear a traffic report for I-5 and know the engine’s fine but the driver is about to blow a gasket.

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