Pretty much everything around us now is capable of speech. This is just one of those things we take for granted today, but it wasn’t always the way. Understandable speech was once an elusive dream for inanimate objects; the famous golem of Jewish legend, for example, was identified as not having a soul precisely because of its lack of speech. Then, in more recent centuries, like the last quarter of the last one, we finally managed to grant the gift of speech to our most important inanimate object, cars.
Yes, pretty much every car today is capable of speech, but back in the early 1980s, making things talk was a trickier proposition. Humans are pretty remarkably creative, though, and so two very interesting and very different solutions came around to solve the problem of your car not being chatty enough, one analog and one digital.
Really, these two solutions couldn’t be more different; one was an application of tried-and-true older analog technology, one leveraged some cutting-edge electronic digital hardware. Each had advantages and disadvantages, and while one was a dead end, it’s still fascinating.
Let’s look at that one – Nissan/Datsun’s Voice Warning System, which was installed on Maximas, 200SX, and Z-cars from 1981 to 1984. Here’s a video of the system in a 1981 Maxima diesel:
Now, you may notice that the quality of the voice is way better than the synthesized voices of that era; that’s because it’s a real voice recording, not synthesized. It’s not digital, because computer memory was far too expensive for that in this era, and it’s not even recorded on magnetic tape. It’s so much better: it’s a phonograph record.
I’m not kidding! It’s a tiny, six-track analog, plastic record, with some electronics to select which of the six messages get played, as you can see here in this great little video recorded by the legendary Murilee Martin, who collects these things:
What I reall like about this system, other than everything, is the sort of drama this woman brings to her simple messages. The way open is emphasized in “right door is open” is so evocative and strange. She sounds like she’s genuinely affected by the openness of that door, and she needs you to, I don’t know, help, somehow? Close the door?
Then there’s the incredible Rube Goldbergian mechanism of this thing; looking at the patent drawings, you can see that this is really a tiny record player in a box:
It’s an incredibly clever and charming machine, pleasingly ridiculous.
I suppose you could argue the system Chrysler used was equally ridiculous, just in a different way. Chrysler called their version the Electronic Voice Alert. You can hear it here:
This was where I, and I think nearly all Gen X Americans, learned the word “ajar.” No one said things were “ajar” before these Chryslers hit the scene; openable things were just open, like doors, which various moms would yell at you to close, wondering if, perhaps, you were raised in a barn.
The Chrysler system, you may notice, has much poorer voice fidelity than the Datsun system, but there’s a reason for that: it’s a synthesized voice, not a recorded one. This does mean that this machine is technically capable of speaking pretty much anything instead of being limited to a pre-recorded set of phrases. The tradeoff is that it sounds like a big, clunky robot.
The heart of this system, or maybe the vocal cords, is the TMS5110A, the evocative name given to the Texas Instruments-designed integrated circuit that was also used in the famous talking toy, the Speak & Spell:
That moment in history – the early 1980s – is likely the only point in time these two methods of having a car say something based on some sort of triggers could have co-existed. It was that blurry bit of time as one era – the analog era – began to evolve into the the digital. Analog may have had some advantage in sound quality, but its days were clearly numbered.
I bet some audio geeks will also say it has a “warmer” sound or some bullshit, too.
Anyway, I love both of these absurd mechanisms, and I love them more when they’re taken together, as a little reminder of an era long gone.
I remember having the Chrysler as a rental in Canada. My partner and I would argue with the car: “the door is not a jar, it’s a door”.
We were young.
I had a friend who worked at a car rental agency back in the day. He told me they would open the doors on all the cars in the lot and make a choir.
In college I used a scavenged voice synthesizer chip to create an output device for my home-built CP/M computer. You could dump a file to a COM port and it would read out the text or have it speak command lines like in the movie War Games. Alas, Ally Sheedy never came over to my house to play.
I hear she plays rough.
Bony knees.
But Johnny 5 says she has nice software.
Is it wrong to be jealous of a robot who can barely speak?
Good golly, no.
I think that synthesized voice is so cool. I am highly biased, because I was a kid when that Speak & Spell came out and I loved mine. I have a ‘circuit bent’ Speak and Spell now that I use to make crazy and fun sounds for music.
Obligatory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiYgNf9cHnw&list=OLAK5uy_knhgvKa011WtzsnPtbwS_V0j3hQc1u6bQ
I was hoping the obligatory clip was going to be this instead:
https://youtu.be/p6uFHC9lfzk?si=K9WQCqFuYIcAL-IN
Mom helped us move from one house to another. Mom was in our 300ZX ahead of me in my VW bus as we readied to leave the old house. Suddenly I see mom jump out of the ZX startled. The car voice had called out both “left door is open” and “fuel supply is low”. Mom didn’t know the car spoke. Fun times.
I remember the speaking cars. And how it was way cool at first, followed very quickly by it being considered annoying and very bad. And, reading this article now I came to the realization that this is almost exactly like the current issue of having functions existing on a screen instead of on buttons, knobs, toggles, wheels and sliders.
For a few years it was so cool to have this on way-futuristic Teslas. Then Tesla and more manufacturers put more and more functions onto a screen.
[Other Manufacturers]: Hey, we can be cool too!
and also fewer switches means less cost![Tesla]: Oh, yeah? Well we’ll be even cooler!
And then as Tesla sales increased, and people bought more non-Tesla overly screen-actuated cars — suddenly,
[everyone]: This sucks!
And the carmakers are already backpedaling.
Reliving the K car era:
“Seat belts… Please fasten seat belts!!”
That digital Chrysler voice would byte your head off if you left the doo open. The Nissan would just needle you until you took action.
I had one of those speaking Nissans and had no idea that was what made it speak. With that said, one day it stopped speaking, and I wonder if that record player is also the reason it stopped? Pretty cool either way.
Yes, the Chrysler voice system used the same chip as the Speak & Spell, but Nissan’s tiny record player system was also based on a technology that had shown up in toys as well. The miniature record player concept was what made the voice in dolls that talked when you pulled a string, or in toys like “See ‘n Say” or “The Farmer Says” where pulling a string or pulling a lever drove the sound output. Nissan just added an electronic selector to determine the phrase that played, instead of just running a set sequence or relying on a mechanical pointer/selector like on toys.
It’s always amazed me how reliable those miniature record players were, considering that they had to work in toys that were carried everywhere, dropped, and just played with endlessly. A car is a pretty harsh environment for a playing a phonograph record, so adopting an amazingly durable (and proven — since the late 1950s, at least) toy technology made sense, really.
Really, while there were plenty of revolutionary tech advances in the 1980s, a lot of seemingly amazing things were actually just particularly good refinements and improved re-packaging/miniaturization of earlier tech — so it had solid development to make it reliable as well as seemingly new. The era straddled taking established tech and enhancing reliability and refining it as well as introducing new tech, which was often engineered to prior decades’ standards for reliability and long life — and that’s why so many devices from the 80s still seem to be restorable and repairable with a little dedication today. “Disposable” commodity consumer electronics weren’t a thing yet. Thankfully.)
Fun fact about The Farmer Says – my younger sister had the version from the 90s with a lever instead of a string. If you pulled the lever and waited until the right moment then tapped the lever lightly, it would skip tracks. So it would be like “the frog says (tap) MOOOOOOO”
The confused look on her face was always worth it.
Juvenile trolling and cognitive dissonance… *Chef’s kiss*
I have but one Speak and Spell memory. I was an especially nerdy kid with little cultural exposure when I found myself picked out of the crowd by an Air National Guard pilot on our class field trip to the base in 1980. The flat topped handlebar mustached guy picked me up and put me in the seat of an F-4 Phantom and asked me if I had a Speak and Spell. I honestly told him I did not know what a Speak and Spell was. He laughed and informed me that the F-4 was equipped with a voice synthesized threat identification system. He drawled to the class that as enemy MiGs approached “a sweet sexy voice” would draw my attention to the threat identification radar and inform me of their distance and vector. He further explained that several synthesized voices were trialed. The pilots ignored all of the voices in the heat of combat except for a sultry woman. I was quite sure that I would somehow be punished for being involved with this computerized sexy voice!
https://youtu.be/Q4wsKNsAMt0?feature=shared
When I was a kid my grandpa had a Maxima of similar vintage that also talked in that smooth female voice. I remember she talked a lot about the doors, and once in a while gave a reminder that the key was in the ignition. It was fascinating at the time!
My mom used to argue with my grandpa’s car “No, a door is a door.”
When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.
Bother, someone beat me to it.
I posted it before I saw this.
On a university choir coach trip in 1998, the driver, who thought himself something of a comedian, got on the mic somewhere near the German/Czech border and said, in one breath: “I’ve got one for you my lovelies: when is a door not a jar oh bugger” and was silent again for miles.
Perfect!
GenX and yes I definitely learned the word ‘ajar’ from Chryslers. I can remember a a snippit on our local news back then explaining that ajar was just another word for open. Memories…
Older GenX (First year of the cohort, by most modern definitions!) and I learned it from non-talking Fords of the mid/late 70s. They had a “Door Ajar” warning light on the dashboard. It seemed like the future back then. The car could tell you if one of those big, heavy doors didn’t quite latch all the way!
The local news teaching people something? Inconceivable!
Back in grade school there were a lot of kids of Italian descent. It drove me nuts that they would say things like “open the lights” or “close the lights”. I thought it was a translation thing, but years later I realized many came from places that had no electricity.
I love variation in language, as long as someone understands your meaning like in your examples it just adds variety to life. Like if someone tells you to “turn off that candle” you know what they mean.
I’ll raise you a glass of
sodapopcokeseltzer…ah heck, beer!Or better yet, when someone is grasping for the right word, uses the wrong word, and you still know what they mean. I went to high school with a girl who was bad about this. Once she was trying to describe another friend of ours – a skinny kid with very curly hair grown out into a “white dude afro” – to someone who didn’t know him. She said, “You know, the tall skinny guy with big fat hair.” The other guy knew immediately who she meant.
My Young Millenial SIL had a Mustang around 2005 after just getting her license. She came home and asked us, collectively, “Is ‘Ajar’ Spanish for ‘Door’?”
As a fellow Gen Xer, I’d like to also point out how many 80s movies seemed to use the brief era of talking cars as comic relief. I can’t name them off the top of my head (because most of those films are best left forgotten) but I was also thrilled to see that the old “Airbag inflates slowly and remains comically inflated” is STILL being used in movies today. Again….not the good ones.
“Your Washer Fluid is … LOW”. If it was just low enough to trigger on hills and on corners, this would repeat over and over again. It was funny about the first 100x in college buddy’s New Yorker, but after that you’d either comply and toss more water into it to shut it up, or you were looking for the fuse to kill it.
That tiny record player is so delightful.
The guy in the Maxima video said it was a tape player that rewinds, which doesn’t make sense unless there is a tape player for each of the messages. The actual thing is so much better.
That’s Murilee Martin and she’s a living legend.
Phil?
Such a saucy minx.
There was a miniature, looping “cartrette” cassette format used for voice warnings in fire alarms in large buildings (I learned about it from a Techmoan video) – I don’t think it was used in any car, but it’s an interesting way to achieve the same general thing.
Sounds like a version of the Mellotron: https://youtu.be/HdkixaxjZCM?feature=shared
The Chrysler may sound like a big, clunky robot but that was the voice of the future in the 80’s. It sounds like it came straight out of the World of Motion pavilion. We didn’t want our computers to sound like people, we wanted them to sound like computers!
Think of Marty McFly’s auto-drying jacket in BTTF2. “Your jacket is now dry“.
Ok. Time for a very old Datsun joke.
Fuji Industries needed a name for their new car company and hired a German firm.
When the Germans asked Fuji how long they had, Fuji said 2 weeks. Germans said really? Dat soon!
I heard that joke at least 50 years ago! But… Fuji Heavy Industries was the parent company of Subaru, not Datsun/Nissan.
The ownership history of Subaru is a bit messy, with Nissan, Toyota and GM owning or having owned parts of the company. GM, at one point, owned 20% but has since fully divested.
Sorry, I’m old too.
No need to apologize.
So in typical Japanese fashion, they ordered a mascot to be created in order to motivate the employees. It was a guy in a giant #2 costume who ran around the factory, dancing and singing. When they were trying to figure out what to call him, the Germans suggested “Herr Zwei” or “Mister Two.” The Datsun team agreed, but felt “Ni-san” was better.
Sry i just made that up.
There’s also Renault 25 (a car Eagle Premier was based on, btw) that had a speech synthesizer as an option.
It could speak in German, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRZDd0YZ_kE&ab_channel=MariuszSanitariusz
That speak & spell couldn’t even spell wikipedia correctly.
The Datsun says please, the Chrysler says thank you. That’s the real difference here.
The Thank you from the Chrysler really got me
If you’re of an age that you remember these systems, then you also remember Eddie Murphy’s stand-up routine about them.
“turn off your fucking lights. wtf, you blind and deaf?”
“Hey, man! Somebody stole your battery. I say we go get the mutherfucker.”
Talking Cars
“Did your car say that?”
“Yeah, baby, it did.”
O god, I still have that cassette! I’ll have to dust it off for the kids later.
Wow: the picture of the Speak & Spell prompted some memories!
And its evil brother, Speak & Math!
Don’t forget Speak & Read!
Texas Instruments was very busy back then!lol
And for a pretty long time afterward – I still have a TI scientific calculator I used in school many many years ago!
That was pretty much the gold standard for calculators in elementary schools everywhere back then!lol
I remember how TI resisted graphing displays for a long time, allowing Casio to get the jump on it.
Casio-another popular name known for calculators and watches.
We had one of those things, and the first time it asked us to spell “guess” we had no idea what it was saying, because it synthesized the pronunciation as “jess”. It’s enunciation needed some work.
Its e-Nunciation, you mean?
… I’ll see myself out.
I can’t think of the Speak & Spell without thinking of the legendary Albert Brooks on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” debuting his new electronic sidekick/stage partner, “Buddy.”
https://youtu.be/p6uFHC9lfzk?si=K9WQCqFuYIcAL-IN
When is a door not a door? When a door is ajar. Endless entertainment for young adult me back then. The wonders of technology!
And old adult me.
You know how I knew that was a dad joke? When it became apparent.
I don’t think we had lower humor standards as kids, we just had to make our own fun. Or rent Eddie Murphy Raw when our parents were too naive to know what was on it (@D-dub)