Ambiq is trying to make it easier for equipment manufacturers to add voice command capabilities to their battery-powered devices. To that end, the company has released a new Voice-on-SPOT (VoS) Kit that provides developers with the hardware and software they need to bring such devices to market more quickly.
The current version of the VoS Kit runs on Ambiq’s low-power Apollo3 Blue Plus MCU, which supports Bluetooth communication and setups with one or two microphones, in addition to signal processing and wake word utilities. However, Ambiq is planning to improve on that with the release a next generation Apollo4 Blue VoS Kit in the third quarter of the year. The updated Apollo4 Kit will support as many as eight digital mic inputs, and further minimize power consumption with the help of two analog ones.
According to Ambiq, the Apollo4 Kit will be ideal for phone calls, as well as audio conferencing and translation applications. The list of devices that could potentially make use of the technology includes remote controls, smartwatches, health trackers, and other smart sensors.
The VoS Kit integrates Ambiq’s hardware and software with peripherals and IP from several third-party providers to help developers build their own voice assistants. In that regard, the solution is compatible with DSP Concepts’ Audio Weaver solution, Retune’s VoiceSpot, and Sensory’s VoiceHub platform, the latter of which was released in October.
“Voice is the most convenient but least utilized input modality to interact with a product,” said Ambiq Solutions Marketing Director Marc Miller. “With the Ambiq VoS Kit, manufacturers finally have a complete solution to implement always-on voice command in their IoT devices while achieving up to one year battery life.”
NXP has released a similar SLN-LOCAL-IOT solution to help bring speech recognition to IoT devices. Allied Market Research has predicted that the overall speech recognition market will climb to $29.28 billion by 2026.
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