Qualcomm is teaming up with SoundHound to bring better voice features to Android smartphones. SoundHound is perhaps best known for its song identification app, though that is only part of a much broader speech recognition and voice assistant portfolio. The company’s platform offers natural language understanding and text-to-speech utilities, and can pick up voice commands from across the room even when a song is playing.
For its part, Qualcomm is planning to install SoundHound’s tech on select (but unspecified) Snapdragon chipsets that will eventually be deployed in future Android devices. App developers and equipment manufacturers will then be able to use the chipset to create products with fully integrated voice command and voice search capabilities.
The SoundHound solution can process voice requests entirely on-device, which should distinguish its offering from other voice assistants (such as Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa) that send data to the cloud. As an edge solution, SoundHound also offers greater privacy because there is no transfer of data and all voice information remains on the device. SoundHound voice requests are still processed in real time, through an assistant that can field multiple commands simultaneously.
Qualcomm and SoundHound are ultimately hoping to provide third parties with a turnkey voice development solution. Allied Market Research has predicted that the global speech recognition market will climb to $29.28 billion by 2026, while ABI Research believes that device makers will ship more than 2 billion devices with dedicated audio chipsets within the same period.
In the meantime, Qualcomm has released a new drone development platform to support industrial applications of drone technology. The company has been trying to promote 5G and edge development with many of its latest products, including the drone development platform and its Snapdragon 870 Mobile Platform, which debuted in January of 2021.
Source: Android Central
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