Nuance Partners with ROOBO

Nuance Communications has partnered with ROOBO to launch an audio capture solution that can be widely adopted by original equipment and design manufacturers (OEMs and ODMs) across smart speakers, robotics, and smart home devices.

This audio capture solution combines Nuance's speech signal enhancement algorithms with ROOBO's hardware/software expertise to create a pre-packaged, integrated hardware/software solution that will be sold by ROOBO.

Nuance speech signal enhancement (SSE) is a suite of signal processing technologies that remove noise from microphone input for improved speech recognition and hands-free communication in noisy environments. Nuance SSE has been commercially used in the automotive domain for more than 15 years, as well as in the smart home and in PC and mobile applications.

In its partnership with ROOBO, Nuance will provide SSE algorithms for wake up word, barge-in, 360-degree speaker localization, and far-field operations. In addition, Nuance's automatic speech recognition (ASR) is pre-trained to support use cases in smart home and robotics.

"In ROOBO, we've found a global hardware partner that shares our goal: providing OEMs and ODMs with pre-tested, high-quality solutions that are fully optimized to provide incredible end user experiences across the IoT," said Kenn Harper, vice president of emerging solutions at Nuance Mobile, in a statement.

"By combining our respective hardware and software expertise, we and Nuance will have the ability to dramatically reduce time to market for OEMs and ODMs," said Fangming Yin, president of ROOBO, in a statement. "This will result not only in speedier product development turnarounds, but also in higher-quality of experiences for end users."

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