The partnership will include NTT and Toyota sharing tech and expertise, and creating big data research projects using vehicle info collected from across Toyota’s fleet of connected cars. The collaboration will also see both work together on studies regarding next-generation connectivity and computing technologies, including 5G mobile networks and edge computing, where work including artificial intelligence is done in a distributed fashion, using processors embedded in vehicles, rather than at a centralized server farm.

NTT and Toyota will also work on studying the best possible deployment of data centers and connectivity infrastructure for blanket coverage of vehicles in operation and transmitting data, and they’ll also work together on building artificial intelligence agents for interacting with and serving drivers.  We’ll see the first results of this partnership put to work in a field trial designed to “assess the feasibility and usability of representative services” related to connected vehicle tech, NTT said in a press release.