The new Harman Sound and Vibration Sensor and External Microphone embedded audio products enable a variety of applications to enhance safety and user experience, from detecting emergency vehicle sirens to listening for exterior speech commands from drivers or traffic controllers to detecting glass breakage or vehicle impact.
From increased awareness of outside sounds inside the vehicle to enhanced communication possibilities for drivers, passengers and emergency vehicles on the road, Harman's Sound and Vibration Sensor and External Microphone offer adaptable and future-looking features. The completely sealed piezo-based Sound and Vibration Sensor can be invisibly integrated into a vehicle’s exterior while the External Microphone is designed to withstand environmental elements and can be configured as a single element or multi-element array.
"Audio has the power to deliver incredible experiences for drivers and passengers, and safety is no exception," says Mitul Jhala, Senior Director, Automotive Embedded Audio, Harman International. "With our new embedded audio products, Sound and Vibration Sensor and External Microphone, OEMs can now offer the acoustic sensing and exterior sound detection consumers are looking for, while enhancing safety both inside and outside the vehicle."
The Sound and Vibration Sensor is a fully developed design that allows for invisible vehicle integration, enabling exterior vehicle speech recognition and acoustic sensing. As future vehicles advance, they will likely be required to include enhanced external sensors to increase awareness of exterior sounds for vehicle occupants and the vehicle systems, such as feeding the acoustic alerts delivered by a Harman Ready Vision system. The devices exhibit a wide band frequency response for accurate speech recognition and acoustic sensing performance, enabling potential AI features such as audio object detection.
"Harman’s Sound and Vibration Sensor and External Microphone provide an integrated sensor product that enables acoustic monitoring of speech commands and sounds on the outside of the vehicle, delivering what consumers need today as opposed to years from now," the company adds.
Harman has more than 30 years of experience designing, optimizing, and integrating automotive microphones and sensors into vehicles. Both the Sound and Vibration Sensor and External Microphone are unique, patented designs and have been specifically designed to meet the needs of OEMs and consumers, delivering improved safety features and connectivity for all vehicle segments, from entry level to luxury.
New In-Vehicle Audio Solutions
At CES 2023 Harman also unveiled Harman Ready on Demand, a software platform for delivering branded audio value, feature enhancement, upgrades, and monetization opportunities in an easy to-use app. An industry first product, Ready on Demand is the company's foundation for providing expanded experiences and future upgrades that can be unlocked by the consumer at any time via in-app purchases throughout the life of the vehicle.
As of 2019, consumers now trigger well over 200 billion smartphone app downloads per year creating an expectation that the devices in their lives should stay current in addition to adapting to their needs. The majority of today’s car audio systems can’t keep pace with this expectation, as car audio systems typically cannot be extended after production. With Ready on Demand, consumers can improve in-vehicle experiences and personalize their vehicle with premium audio features at any time.
"Today, when you purchase a vehicle, it’s not always possible to get every feature you may want right at the start — cost may be a factor, as are availability and packaging constraints," says Armin Prommersberger, Senior Vice President of Product Management, Harman International. "Ready on Demand transforms the traditional complex retrofit upgrade process for audio into something quick and easy for consumers, who can now create and customize their in-vehicle listening experience with just a few clicks, even after the initial vehicle purchase, all built on Harman’s audio, system integration and user interface development expertise."
"Ready on Demand provides a deeper connection to the consumer through the smooth integration of branded audio DNA in the user interface, and includes a marketplace with an opportunity for a unique partnership synergy with the automaker. Experience packages and feature extensions are available on-demand and can be purchased at any point in the vehicle lifecycle. This presents an opportunity for OEMs to create recurring revenue streams after the vehicle sale, for not only the initial purchaser of the vehicle but second and later owners as well," the company adds.
Ready on Demand is pre-integrated with not only the Harman Ready Upgrade application framework, including Harman AudioworX audio processing libraries, but also with the Harman Ignite cloud back-end for ecommerce and content download. This will significantly reduce required development and increase speed of implementation.
Harman has developed an initial set of on-demand experiences including packaged bundles of carefully selected audio and sound features. Examples of currently defined packages include personalization and sound enhancements that activate innovative and proprietary acoustic techniques in the vein of augmented and mixed reality to transport the listener to new virtual environments, adding a layer of ambiance, serenity, or excitement to their favorite music.
Harman Ready Upgrade is a new set of fully upgradeable hardware and software products that allow OEMs to perform upgrades throughout the life of the vehicle and accelerate time to market, while enabling consumers to add and upgrade vehicle features as easily as they would with their smartphones. Ready Upgrade features three families of production-grade Cockpit Domain Controllers, advanced software, an array of pre-integrated features and a full suite of low-code software development tools that greatly reduce new feature time to market and cost for OEMs.
Harman also unveiled its latest road-ready products including the Neo QLED Auto, Ready Display, a partnership with Samsung, and Harman Ready Vision, a system that displays intuitive turn-by-turn directions on the windshield to help enhance driver cognition. Ready Vision also uses computer vision and machine learning for 3D object detection to deliver non-intrusive collision warnings, blind spot warnings, lane departure, lane change assist and low speed zone notifications to the driver, with high precision.
www.harman.com
