How Amazon Taught the Echo Auto to Hear You in a Noisy Car

The game is a good way not just to pass the time, but to show off what the Echo Auto can do as we creep toward the Sunnyvale lab where Amazon taught it to understand the human voice in the acoustic crucible that is the car.Amazon introduced the road-going, Alexa-equipped device in September of last year, and started shipping to some customers in January. Amazon is working with some automakers to build Alexa into new cars, but the $50 Auto works with tens of millions of older vehicles already on the road: All you need is a power source (either a USB port or cigarette lighter) and a way to tap into the car’s speakers (Bluetooth or an aux cable).About the size and shape of a cassette, the Echo Auto sits on your dashboard and brings 70,000 Alexa skills into your car. Its eight built-in microphones let you make phone calls, set reminders, compile shopping lists, find nearby restaurants and coffee shops, and hear Jake Gyllenhaal narrate The Great Gatsby.An Artificial Head Measurement System with “the acoustically relevant structures of the human anatomy” plays a key role in Amazon's development of the Echo Auto.Adding the Auto to a growing collection of Echo products makes sense. Instead Motwani leads me into a gray room the size of a one-car garage, most of it taken up by a black Honda Accord.Amazon build a library of road noises by sending drivers into the wild in cars loaded up with microphones, then playing the sound recorded by each at the speaker in the same location.For up to 18 hours on end, the dummy will talk to the Echo Auto sitting on the dash, calling out the same commands and queries over and over again.In the driver’s seat is what looks a bit like the upper bit of a crash test dummy, a head and shoulders mounted on a gray plastic box.