Sensory Inc.‘s Low Power Sound Detector (LPSD) technology is starting to take off among chip manufacturers. The company says that companies including DSP Group, Knowles, and QuickLogic have all integrated the technology in their products, and that more are in the pipeline.

The LPSD technology is one of the keys to Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree solution, which enables voice command interaction with devices. The LPSD technology’s role is to sense when a user is speaking, and in particular to activate devices when trigger words such as “Hey Siri” are detected. Its low-power aspect allows the systems using it to conserve energy, since it only ‘wakes’ the audio system when trigger terms or phrases are detected; the company says that a hardware implementation can reduce overall power consumption for always-listening systems by half, and in some applications can even bring power consumption down to 1mA.

Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree solution has seen some major integrations in recent months, from Vuzix smartglasses to various SoC offerings from Intel, and is now getting a higher-profile with these new LPSD integrations. Commenting in a statement, QuickLogic CEO Brian Faith testified that the technology’s integration into the QuickLogic EOS S3 processing solution “provides unprecedented always-on speech recognition capability, and will facilitate a new generation of voice-driven applications capable of running on a fraction of the power consumption of competing technologies.”

(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)