Turning Up Volume On Car Speakers

For 14 years, Fletcher Murray has given in-car navigation systems their voice. Now he is giving them ears. The Burbank media professional and his company have been making audio files for car navigation systems for 14 years. And in that time, Murray estimates he’s recorded some 40,000 voice files, the kind that tell drivers, at the push of a button, when to turn left or right, or are approaching their destination. Now, his company, The Association, has a whole new set of work as car manufacturers scramble to install voice-actuated command systems in their vehicles. Want to open the window? Turn on the radio? Just say so. But getting a car to do that isn’t magic. It requires a computer that understands the human voice, and in dozens of languages. That process also requires creating audio files – say of an English speaker saying unlock the car – which are then linked up with a computer that completes the task. To make those recordings in such diverse languages as German, Arabic, Finnish, Swedish, Japanese and Chinese was quite a task for Murray. He had to track down 10 speakers of each language, both male and female, that were no more than two generations from their native country. That made the speech sounds as natural as native speakers. “It took us about five days to find our Finnish speakers,” said Murray. “The first pass is getting languages – then we’ll get into dialects and then regionalisms,” he said. Murray expects the work to become a long-term business at his video and production company, which has a full-time staff of four at its offices at 135 N. Screenland Drive. (It also does training and marketing videos, commercials and promos for television shows. It won an Emmy Award in 2002.) What Murray can charge for voice work depends on multiple factors, including whether a profesional voice actor is needed to complete the job. Creating the demand is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which in April issued guidelines for carmakers to come up with more distraction-free features, such as voice-activation. The firm’s first customer for creating audio files heard on navigation systems, Alpine Electronics of America Inc., based in Torrance, remains a client to this day, with its equipment being used in the Honda and Acura brands. Alpine, along with Johnson Controls Inc. of Milwaukee, also was the first customer for which Murray created recordings for voice-actuated commands. As large as the auto market is, there is an even larger one that Murray wants to tap into that have the biggest dashboard of all – the military. Attack helicopters, in particular, are a use in which voice-activated controls would be a benefit. “Anything that can cut two seconds off a task is of interest to them if the computer can understand you,” he said. – Mark R. Madler