Harman Announces New OEM Infotainment Solutions With AI, Personalisation, Safety Features

Harman has announced a slew of new products, features, and developer tools to bring next-generation personalised and AI-enabled in-cabin features and experiences to cars. The automotive technology solutions provider, which is a subsidiary of Samsung, has expanded its Ready range of OEM audio, visual, and communication devices. It says these new offerings are available to OEMs now, and can help reduce integration complexity. The company also wants to allow carmakers to speed up hardware and software development.

With the promise of “intelligent and meaningful in‑vehicle experiences” that support over-the-air updates for new features and capabilities throughout a car’s lifecycle, Harman envisions high levels of personalisation as a differentiator for OEMs. New offerings include Ready StreamShare, which allows for up to four personalised media zones in a car using a Bluetooth hub and ultra-low-latency headphones. This would allow for personal content consumption as well as shared experiences and even conversation between occupants.

HALOsonic Electronic Sound Synthesis is a tool to create custom vehicle sound signatures, with new instruments and an intuitive tuning workflow. The company also touts its coordinated lighting and tactile elements which use AI to create a multi-sensory in-cabin atmosphere.

Going beyond standard infotainment screens, Ready Display is the industry’s first HDR10+ Automotive certified display, and uses Samsung Neo QLED panels. A new value-performance model, NQ1, offers a wider colour gamut and better daylight readability than standard LCD panels. Ready Vision QVUE is a line-of-sight windshield display with gaze-aware brightness adjustment, obstruction detection, and eMirror Live View for turning.

Other new capabilities focus on safety, such as individual heartbeat detection, allowing for driver and occupant awareness and proactive interventions based on stress or emotional state. Enhanced occupant position monitoring can be used to determine how airbags deploy. Ready Aware is a Vehicle-to-Network (V2N) alert system for hazards, emergency vehicles, complex intersections, and other conditions outside the cabin. It uses existing connectivity and machine learning to reduce false positives. 

To help automakers develop their own experiences and software ecosystems, Harman is also offering cloud-native testing and validation tools, plus smart over-the-air fleetwide update mechanisms. 

The company has a significant manufacturing and development presence in India, and is in the process of expanding further. Its OEM clients in India include Tata Motors, Maruti Suzuki, and Mahindra & Mahindra, and India is also a significant export hub for it.