ABI Expects 2 Billion Devices to Have NLP or Ambient Sound Chips by 2026

ABI Research, a global tech market advisory firm, estimates that more than 2 billion end devices will be shipped with a dedicated chipset for ambient sound or natural language processing by 2026.

"NLP and ambient sound processing will follow the same cloud-to-edge evolutionary path as machine vision. Through efficient hardware and model compression technologies, this technology now requires fewer resources and can be fully embedded in end devices," said Lian Jye Su, principal analyst for artificial intelligence and machine learning at ABI Research, in a statement. "At the moment, most of the implementations focus on simple tasks, such as wake word detection, scene recognition, and voice biometrics. However, moving forward, AI-enabled devices will feature more complex audio and voice processing applications."

The popularity of Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and various chatbots in the enterprise sector has led to the boom of the voice user interface, the company said in a recent report.

"Aside from dedicated hardware, machine learning developers are looking to leverage various novel machine learning techniques, such as multimodal learning and federated learning. Through multimodal learning, edge AI systems can become smarter and more secure if they combine insights from multiple data sources. With federated learning, end users can personalize voice AI in end devices, as edge AI can improve based on learning from their unique local environments," Su added.