Vuzix has partnered with Vivoka to boost the speech recognition capabilities of its M-Series of Smart Glasses. Vivoka is a speech technology specialist based in France, and is providing Vuzix with tech that allows the Glasses to offer voice support for 30 different languages.
The new voice features are being introduced with M-Series software update 2.3.0. In addition to extending support for more languages, the enhanced platform will do a better job of recognizing different dialects and access (including the Cantonese dialect), and improve the overall performance and accuracy of the entire speech recognition system. Vivoka’s technology has been integrated into Vuzix’s own speech command engine.
The company will also provide a Voice Development Kit that can be used to add voice features like wake words and text-to-speech to an existing app. The Kit can be used to enable voice biometrics, and can support offline speech recognition.
Beyond the speech recognition upgrade, software update 2.3.0 will deliver better Wi-Fi frequency support, which will in turn improve the performance of the glasses while roaming in an enterprise environment. In that regard, the glasses can now pull location data from a paired smart phone through Vuzix’s companion app, and the glasses will automatically adjust to the local time zone whenever a network is joined. Vuzix has also updated its Video Streamer App, which can be used to stream live video to popular sites like YouTube and Twitch.
The M-Series includes the M400 and M4000 devices. Vuzix is hoping that the update will enable new applications and make the glasses more appealing to a wider audience.
“The broad language support capability of our products is a distinct competitive advantage for us across many foreign markets,” said Vuzix President and CEO Paul Travers. “Many areas make it difficult to have perfect connectivity for Cloud solutions and Vivoka’s solutions can run offline, on-device, to operate anywhere, anytime.”
“Wearables like Vuzix’ smart glasses will bring more voice tech mass adoption,” added Vivoka Co-Founder and CEO William Simonin. “Our goal is more than ever to provide developers with state-of-the-art technologies that are easy to adopt and to turn into real inventions.”
This is the second time that Vuzix has upgraded its language system in 2021. The company released OS version 2.0.2 back in February, though the platform only offered support for 12 languages at the time. The M-Series Glasses have proven to be particularly useful in the healthcare industry, where they have been used for surgical training and to improve the quality of care for people in nursing homes.
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