Renault Clio Voice Control

[Emerson Mata]

Yourmultimedia system has a voice recognition system which allows voice control of some of the functions on the multimedia system and on your phone. You can use your multimedia system or your phone while keeping your hands on the steering wheel.

You can use voice control to call a contact in your phonebook, enter a destination and change the radio station without touching the screen. Press 1 and follow the audio and visual instructions provided by the system and on the screen.

Your multimedia system has a voice recognition system which allows voice control of some functions and applications of the multimedia system and your phone. This enables you to use your multimedia system or your phone while keeping your hands on the steering wheel.

You can use voice control to call a contact in your phonebook, enter a destination, change radio station etc without touching the screen. Briefly press the voice recognition button 1 on the steering wheel or 2 on the steering column control of your vehicle. The multimedia screen will display the main voice control menu.

Note: you can also call a stored contact or a number from the main voice control menu. To do this, press the voice control button then say the name of the contact or the number you want to call.

Note: You can say the contact's name or their number directly from the main page. To cut off the synthetic voice during playback of the contact's name or phone number, press the mute button on the steering column control.

To activate your phone's voice recognition system with the multimedia system, press and hold your vehicle's voice recognition button. The multimedia screen displays your phone's main voice control menu.

When using your phone's voice recognition with the multimedia system, the transfer of cellular data required for its operation can generate additional costs not included in your phone service contract.

Got an iPhone*? You can now use the Siri voice recognition built in your car and access your phone's data using the vehicle's control. All you need to do is connect your phone with MediaNAV Evolution via Bluetooth.

Access the best driving applications from your iPhone (iPhone 5 and iOS 7.1) on your MediaNAV Evolution. You can connect your iPhone to the USB port using a certified cable and enjoy your favourite music on the go. What's more? You can easily read or dictate messages, make calls or play a new route.

Access the best smartphone driving apps (Android 5 or above). Google Maps displays directly on your MediaNAV Evolution screen for easy navigation. You can also dictate any messages and quickly access your favourite music. Don't forget to activate your phone's mobile data and connect it via the USB port with a manufacturer's certified cable.

If you have a look at _synthesis you can see that early versions of electronic speech came up around the mid 60s and by the late 70s early 80s it was turned into a one chip solution and was ready for the consumer market.

Texas Instruments (TI) was one of the big players producing those speech synthesizer chips. The "big" product they had was a toy to help children learn languanges or math. They were called "Speak & Spell" or "Speak & Math" and used TIs now famous speech synthesizer. The chips were also used in Arcade machines, calculators, Home Computers and general appliances that had the need to talk. Here is a pretty nice wikipedia article about different versions of the speech synthesizer :

I know that in america chrysler had the EVA (Electronic Voice Alert) system. A module that used TI speech synthesis to announce faults in a lot of their models. But here in europe huge american cars were not a thing and so we got none of that here...

For me it is really important to understand things. If i make, build or research something i try not just to take a already existing solution. I like to take my own notes, make my own thoughts and probably waste a lot of time doing things twice... BUT it will stay in my brain and create a base of knowledge to build on.

What you will find here is a collection of notes and thoughts that will help me understand as much as possible about the Texas Instruments speech synthesis found in Renault synthesizer boxes. My imaginary goal is to preserve the ROM data of the increasingly rare synthesizer boxes and maybe use the same type of speech synthesizer IC in a standalone application where a modern Microcontroller is used to control the speech synthesizer AND simulate a ROM to the synthesizer. I know there is already a full emulator of the Texas Instruments Speech... But wouldnt it be nice to use a piece of real 1980s electronics?

The Speech Synthesizer used in the boxes is a Texas Instruments TMS5110A (Datasheet of TMS5100 wich is pin compatible) in combination with a special ROM called TMS6100(Datasheet). This ROM is a very special part. It has its own very strange way of communicating to the speech synthesizer. Lets start with a look at the PINOUT of both ICs. I wanted to see the ICs directly next to each other and so i made this handy little picture:

At the first look you will probably ask yourself why the ROM has so many unused (NC) PINs (marked in GREY). And the answer is: I dont know... For me this looks like a waste of material. But there will be a reason... i guess... The reason is probably not to make connecting it more easy. The corrosponding PINs on the TMS5110 are in a totally different order so you always have to route your PCB traces in a strange way... All the 8 used PINs from TMS6100 are directly connected to TMS5110. I have marked all directly connected PINs used by the ROM GREEN.

Later we will see that they are "using" the unused pins to just route signals "through" them. It is important to know that the NC Pins on the ROM (and synth) are really NC inside the chip! If we want to replace the ROM with something else we have to make absolutely sure the NC PINs of our solution are really NC! Dont make the mistake like me and think "because a trace goes through that PIN it must be relevant for the circuit." Because its not.

If you are easyly distractable like i am here is some trivia for you: The ROM they used has a gigantic capacity of 16 kilobytes. This may sound like nothing today but back in 1983 when they made this thing it was quite a lot. Lets compare it to the Atari 2600 wich was sold around the same time. The Atari had 128 BYTES of RAM and a whole Game was around 2-8 kilobytes. Commodore put gigantic 64 kilobytes of ram in the C64 and this was A LOT at that time. Commodore wanted to rival the Apple 2 wich had 4 - 64 kilobytes of ram at that time. You can see that the 16 kilobyte ROM was probably the most expensive part. And now to distract you even more lets watch half an hour of computer chronicles from 1983 about revolutinary storage devices like "Hard Disks" wich slowly started to shrink from compact car sizes down to shoe Box sizes...

The next thing we should talk about is the supply voltage(marked in RED and BLACK)... It would be too easy if they just used a regular voltage. So they decided to use 9 Volts NEGATIVE. 9V are not just pretty high for modern standards but also its negative. But lets not focus on that little detail... later its getting even harder...

Another pretty interesting detail are the TEST PINs (marked in BLUE). There are 4 dedicated PINs just for some kind of testing purpose. At the time of writing this i have no idea how to use...

There is basically no proper information about wiring and using these boxes online in english. The wiring diagrams from Renault are either unusable (they use the color of the connectors in the car to identify them... If you just have the control unit without the car you cant follow the diagrams...) or just wrong (They tried to fix the colored connector problem in later wiring diagrams BUT numbered the connectors wrong).

There are 2 versions of controls for the system. I have auto translated the general function description for both versions. Its not perfect but it tells us everything we need to know about the function of the buttons.

If you put (german) "Bremsbelge" into a translator to french you will get "les plaquettes de frein". (french) "plaquette" directly translates to (german) "Plakette". Now it makes sense why they used "Bremsplaketten" ... its not right... but it at least makes sense now... French is an interesting language.

Datasheets are no problem. And i can even find discussions where people have dumped those roms. The informations i got are mainly from some TI99/A forums where people discuss to retrofit speech synthesis to their home computers. I even found ROM emulators and crazy things like that. But the TI99 dudes use the TI99 to dump the roms. Thats no option for me because i dont have such a computer and i dont know anybody with a TI99.

I found another project wich was even featured here on Hackaday... But the maker behind that seems not to give out any significant information depending the inner workings of his solution... Wich made me a little bit sad... I can of course be totally wrong and just have not searched right... But im sad anyway...

If anybody is interested in more information about the TMS5110 speech synthesizer... i found some hints to patents wich include the inner workings of the tms51XX. the datasheet for the tms5110 seems to be super rare.

Thats my first rough trace of the boards made in GIMP... Of course i use the totally wrong tool for the job as long as it is free ... Wouldnt it be cool to be abled to reproduce the boards? Probably not... but i will try to do it anyway...

My native language is german. Listening to recorings of the german version of the synthesizers i noticed that the voice has an accent. I am still amazed that an american product can speak german with a very slight french accent. Thats crazy.

For non native speakers the differences from a slight accent will be probably not noticable (i think). I asked some german friends and they also hear the accent... so im not crazy :D ... Thats at least something...

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