Subaru and Honda Show Harman-Sourced Aha Radios at CES

Harman International’s Aha unit will add three more car maker partners this year in addition to the partnerships it announced at CES with Subaru and Honda, Robert Acker, general manager of Aha, told Consumer Electronics Daily.

Subaru and Honda will integrate Aha equipment in select model 2013 vehicles due in dealerships in late summer, the companies said at CES, and Kenwood said two head units would be in stores this spring. Pioneer launched the first two Aha-ready head units last spring -- the AVIC-Z130BT and AVIC-X930BT. Aha also has relationships with Alpine, Acker said, but no formal announcements have been made about specific products. Subaru demonstrated its Aha system at CES in a Subaru BRZ with a Fujitsu F10 head unit, a company spokesman said.

On the content side, Aha added CBS Radio, Rhapsody, MOG and Slacker to its option menu, along with select NPR content and AOL’s Shoutcast, which links to some 40,000 Internet radio stations, Acker said. Users can access podcasts as well as audiobooks through librivox.com and podiobooks.com. Both hardware and content partnerships “are just at the beginning,” Acker said, and Aha’s intent is to have agreements with “as many content providers as possible."

Aha is a cloud-based audio system that makes Web content available on a radio interface, enabling car makers and aftermarket electronics companies to offer streaming services without having to build a new user interface, touchscreen-based browser or a complicated app structure, Acker said. “We enable them to bring the Internet into the consumer electronics products they're building in a simple, easy to use way,” he said. As content providers change their APIs (application program interfaces), Aha keeps track of the changes, along with new websites that appear, adds links to them, and maps them to the APIs that CE companies have built to, he said. “You can design once, and it works with our entire content database,” he said. As the content database continues to grow, the platform is handling those changes in the cloud “so they don’t have to worry about anything on the Net affecting their consumer electronics products,” he said.

Users with an Aha radio, press preset buttons for an audiobook or podcast in the same way they select an AM or FM radio station. Web-based content pauses when a listener changes stations and resumes where they left off, Acker said. Users can also assign a preset to Facebook and Twitter accounts and have the latest updates read over the sound system using Aha’s text-to-speech engine. Or, partners can choose their own text-to-speech engine to create a unique voice, he said. Users can search for and select mobile presets for Aha when they're not driving, he said. Subaru cars will have 24 presets, he said, divided into four bands: AM, FM, satellite radio and Aha, he said.

Aha is adding language detection to the platform for its launch in the Europe market later this year, Acker said. The feature will convert speech to the Western European languages in addition to English.

Aha said its preset approach addresses driver safety concerns in a vehicle because it uses a familiar interface, and users program station information when not driving. Acker described a Yelp application where it has named a station “Hungry” so users can set up parameters -- when the car isn’t in motion -- for cuisine and quality rating preferences. When they're driving, drivers hit the “Hungry” station, Aha goes to Yelp, pulls down customized results based on current location and the direction the vehicle is traveling, and reads out choices using text-to-speech, he said. “We include the location of the restaurant and a phone number so that if your car’s electronics system has been synched to your phone, you can press a button and call the restaurant,” he said. Or, if the car has a navigation system, it could take over and direct the vehicle to the location, he said.

Aha systems communicate to the Internet via smartphone, Acker said. Users plug their phones in or connect with Bluetooth using Android phones. When they choose Aha on the car stereo, the connected phone launches the Aha app. The phone’s screen will “lock you out so you're not touching or interfacing with the phone while driving,” he said. The radio communicates through the phone and the phone’s app communicates to the Internet over the cellular network to Aha servers, he said. One car maker Aha is working with will unveil an Aha radio with an embedded cellular modem, eliminating the need for a phone in the chain, Acker said. He wouldn’t identify the company but said he expected several automotive companies to take that route.

Aha gets a “small, single one-time fee per device” for each car or CE device shipped as a license fee, Acker said. Longer term, the business model will focus on building deeper relationships with content partners to help them generate revenue. Currently, podcast providers have sponsorships for advertising and Aha plans to help them “better monetize” with localized information tied to the city that the consumer is in, he said. There is no subscription fee for Aha, and it will stay that way, Acker said, although consumers with premium music services such as Rhapsody and Slacker will have to be subscribers to use those services.