Sensory Brings Low-Power Wake Words to Mobile Apps
Sensory, a Silicon Valley-based company focused on improving the user experience and security of consumer electronics through embedded AI technologies, announced that it has made a breakthrough in running its TrulyHandsfree wake word and speech recognition AI engine directly on Android and iOS smartphone applications at low-power. As a software component, TrulyHandsfree can be adapted to any app without requiring special purpose hardware or DSPs to capture efficiencies in computing.
Introduced in 2009, TrulyHandsfree paved the way for the hands-free operation we have come to expect with today’s always-listening personal assistant solutions. TrulyHandsfree has seen large commercial success by running on special purpose hardware for low-power operation. Companies like Avnera, Cirrus Logic, Conexant/Synaptics, CSR/Qualcomm, DSP Group, Knowles, QuickLogic, Realtek, XMOS and many others have penetrated the market for voice assistants using Sensory TrulyHandsfree technology.
Until now, Sensory says, always-listening wake word solutions for apps required too much power to be practical, especially for apps that remain open and active in the background. Additionally, having to maintain the same user experience across operating systems, and across all different devices added an extra layer of complexity. However, this isn’t the case anymore. TrulyHandsfree streamlines the implementation and coding process, allowing developers to deploy apps with power-efficient always-listening wake word and command set capabilities across all popular mobile and PC operating systems.
In 2017 Sensory embarked on investigations of using Qualcomm and ARM as more standard cross-platform solutions to figure out how to lower power consumption for wake words used across mobile platforms. Sensory came up with a series of independent actions that when combined could lower power consumption on a mobile app using a wake word by more than 80%, or a reduction of approximately 200mAh in a 12-hour day.
Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree currently supports US English, UK English, Australian English, Indian English, Arabic, Dutch, French (EU and Canadian), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese (EU and Brazil), Russian, Spanish (EU, Latin America and US), Swedish and Turkish. An SDK for TrulyHandsfree is available for Android, iOS, Linux, Mac OS, QNX and Windows. Sensory provides developer support for cloud service interfaces on Android, iOS, Linux, Mac OS, Windows as well as support for dozens of proprietary DSPs, microcontrollers, smart microphones and other low-power embedded devices. SDK updates taking advantage of lower power TrulyHandsfree are now being rolled out for Android and iOS in Q2 2018.