Tier 1 Automotive Software Provider Creates Smarter In-Car Infotainment Systems

We provided services to collect natural language data and text data, covering all the scenarios and variation that the system might encounter in the real world.

May 21, 2019

The Company

A leading provider of vehicle electronics software approached us to collect audio and linguistic data to help develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) capabilities for its in-car infotainment system.

The Challenge

For an in-car infotainment system — or any automatic speech recognition system — to recognize and correctly process voice commands, it must be trained on speech data that accounts for a broad range of inputs and all possible variations in how people speak. There are countless different verbal commands a driver might use to adjust the climate control, radio, navigation, phone, and other settings in an automobile. Training these systems to understand multiple dialects and various speaker categories poses an even bigger challenge, requiring many thousands of utterances in each of the targeted languages.

The Solution

We provided services to collect natural language data and text data, covering all the scenarios and variations that the system might encounter in the real world. Working with in-market, on-demand crowds of native speakers, we are able to rapidly expand ASR capabilities in new locations and languages, for any given scenario. And because the company has strict standards for audio recording quality, we replicate the same advanced recording procedures across different locations and studios and supervise them to comply with quality standards for a range of languages used in the automotive industry.

Services include:

Spontaneous, unscripted speech data collection in which native speakers are given a set of scenarios (i.e., how do you ask to lower the temperature, put your favorite music on, or change the radio station?) and must generate various responses
Text data collection uses similar scenarios as speech but aimed to obtain larger volumes of data and a broader variety of speakers
Scripted speech data collection for short, fixed utterances
Test driving simulations to mimic the cognitive load of driving, so speakers come up with more natural, real-world responses
Country-specific studio data collection with specialist equipment to ensure that different studios are calibrated for precision and compliance of strict audio standards

The Result

Spontaneous speech data that fits users’ natural behavior
Rapid deployment in new languages and locations
Strict audio quality compliance across a range of over 40 languages

Working with us for more than six years, this company has created a smarter, more connected, and natural in-car experience — with systems that can recognize natural, spontaneous responses.

With our data collection and annotation services, the company has rapidly expanded the system in over 20 new languages. And because our linguists have deep expertise in both creating and localizing scenarios that mimic real-world driving conditions, the Tier 1 provider knows that it is receiving the high-quality speech and language training data it needs for its ASR systems.