Testing Voice-Controlled & Smartphone Integrated Infotainment Systems
A tutorial and accompanying paper on testing infotainment systems that was presented at the AES Automotive Conference, Sept 11-13, 2019, Neuburg an der Donau, Germany.
Voice-controlled and smartphone integrated vehicle infotainment systems are notoriously complex to test. They have numerous connections from wired to wireless and contain much signal processing, both on the record and on the playback side. This means that their characteristics change according to ‘real world’ conditions of the vehicle’s environment, including cabin acoustics and background noises from road, wind and motors. Furthermore, their multifunctional nature means that there are many aspects of the device that may need to be tested, ranging from voice recognition to music playback and operation as a hands-free telephone. Due to their complex non-linear use cases, these devices often need to be tested at different levels and different environmental conditions.
This tutorial offers practical hands-on advice on how to test such devices, including test configurations, what to measure, the challenges of making open-loop measurements, and how to select a test system.
Download presentation (slides)
Paper Introduction
Audio Tests for Infotainment Systems
Infotainment systems have become increasingly challenging to test. They have many possible interfaces; hard-wired or auxiliary input, radio, CD, memory card, hard drive, USB, Bluetooth, smartphone (including Apple CarPlay and Android Auto) and even voice. They contain much signal processing, both on the record side (e.g. beamforming, background noise filtering, voice activity detection, and on the playback side (e.g.loudness, compression, equalization, and active noise cancellation). Some even have wake word detection, e.g. “Hey Siri”, “OK Google”, and “Alexa”. Due to their complex non-linear use cases, these devices often need to be tested at different levels and in different environmental conditions, for example with different background noises and different test signals. To further complicate matters, the test signal may need to be in the cloud to enable playback for testing voice recognition systems. Each manufacturer’s ecosystem is different in how it plays and records.
Smartphone integrated infotainment systems usually require an internet connection with voice services in order to process commands. On the playback side, some enable you to upload your own recordings such as iTunes (although bear in mind that these will probably be compressed). Others require them to be on a media streaming platform such as Spotify. For microphone testing, some systems such as Alexa allow access to recordings made; others do not for security and privacy reasons, which makes microphone testing challenging. Although the actual physical testing setup is very similar from vehicle to vehicle, for each it is necessary to understand how to wirelessly route the signal. Furthermore, each device needs activating with a different wake word, needs different delay compensation, and records for a different amount of time after it hears the wake word. This needs figuring out (largely by trial and error) for each infotainment system that you need to test.
Infotainment System Testing Standards
Although, there are currently no standards for testing infotainment systems with smartphone integration, principles and test configurations can be borrowed from many other audio devices and use existing standards such as IEC for loudspeakers, IEEE/TIA/ITU for speakerphones, and ETSI for background noise. Flexibility of the test system and experience with testing a wide range of acoustic devices is critical to enable a device to be completely characterized. This paper focuses on how to implement basic acoustic tests and some of the more complex real-world tests along with the techniques and standards that may be used.
The rest of the paper covers:
Basic Acoustic Tests
Advanced or ‘Real World’ Testing of Infotainment Systems
Speech Recognition
Background Noise
Voice Quality
Measurement System Requirements
More about testing infotainment systems.
