New Lenovo Smartphones Feature Voice Wake-Up Capability

Lenovo’s PHAB2 and PHAB2 Plus smartphones sport an unusual feature: Voice activation.

The technology comes by way of Knowles Corporation, whose VoiceIQ smart microphone has been embedded in the new smartphones. The technology lets users ‘wake up’ their devices by voice command, and features advanced noise suppression capabilities enabling it to decipher commands in noisy settings, and even when the user is several meters away.

The technology may hint at emerging trends in the mobile market, with other IT and consumer electronics companies also increasingly investing in speech and even voice recognition technologies. While the biometric identification capability is currently absent from the PHAB devices’ use of speech recognition, Lenovo’s commitment to another form of biometric authentication—fingerprint recognition—for its Motorola smartphone line, and that feature’s inclusion in the new PHAB2 Pro, hint at more sophisticated, perhaps even multimodal, biometric recognition capabilities in devices to come.