Battery-operated smart speakers are gaining traction in the smart home space. It is evidenced by growing cooperation among firms to develop portable, low-power and always-on voice solutions.
Battery-operated smart speakers are gaining traction in the smart home space. It is evidenced by growing cooperation among firms to develop portable, low-power and always-on voice solutions.
Embedded digital signal processing solution enabler DSP Concepts, AI and speech recognition technology specialist Sensory Inc. and ultra-low power solution provider Ambiq Micro have recently teamed up to develop energy-efficient smart products that do not sacrifice audio performance.
With Sensory’s Low Power Sound Detector (LPSD) and TrulyHandsfree wake word and command phrase detection, DSP Concept’s sound detection, beamforming, and noise reduction, Ambiq Micro’s Apollo2 microcontroller is able to achieve accurate key phrase detection rates while consuming 4x lower power consumption, in comparison with existing solutions, according to a statement released by Ambiq Micro.
This enables high-quality, multi-microphone beam forming and noise reduction algorithms to run for more than a week using a CR2032 coin battery.
The solution is reportedly the first SoC/audio algorithm fully qualified by Amazon and there are two, four and fix microphone configurations.
“The combination of the power efficiency and audio quality of our technologies is the most important factor in driving a frictionless user experience and a new level of adoption in the market,” said Dr. Paul Beckmann, founder and CTO of DSP Concepts.
As devices continue to get smaller, so will the batteries within them, said Bernie Brafman, VP of business development at Sensory. “We are pleased to team up with Ambiq and DSP Concepts to provide a solution that will enable more companies to add TrulyHandsfree always-listening voice capabilities to their power-constrained applications.”
Today, TrulyHandsfree can be found in leading mobile phones, apps, action cameras, IoT devices and toys.
“More and more innovative products are embracing voice-enabled user interfaces and, together, we’re delivering the ultra-low power capabilities to bring true always-listening and always-on voice control to battery-powered intelligent devices,” said Aaron Grassian, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Ambiq Micro.