Google / Waymo : Audio Branding / Audio UX

Google approached us in 2016 to create the entire branded audio experience for their self driving car Firefly. For this project there were 2 key areas of deliverables: Internal audio experience (various notifications and ui) and the Pedestrian Warning Tone (aka the engine tone).

A massive part of this project was not only discovering the Firefly branded tonal pallet for internal and external sounds, but also designing an engine tone that would pass the new NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) Quiet Vehicles requirement that had recently passed legislation. These guidelines are intended to make e car engines audible to pedestrians from idle to 18 mph. There are very strict requirements highlighted in the guidelines that I won’t dive into detail on (there’s a 300 page document for that), but I can say that teh guidelines play a large role in the design process for the engine tone.

Seeing that this is new technology, we wanted something friendly, approachable and inviting that also added delight throughout the experience. All of the internal and external tones harmonize with one another creating a soundscape that is clean and unobtrusive, but also functions well and communicates to the user.

Feel free to reach out for more details on this project - this was a very intensive design and acoustic engineering process that we can only scratch the surface here.