TI Releases Voice-Enabled TV Remotes

Texas Instruments today announced new voice-enabled ZigBee RF4CE and Bluetooth Smart remote control development kits that will bring advanced voice features to more remotes and more consumers.

Working with Nuance Communications, TI's new remote control solutions deliver high-quality voice recognition powered by Nuance's Dragon TV in a limited bandwidth stream without quality loss or impact on the results.

TI's solution delivers advanced consumer applications, including voice commands, hands-free search and navigation, and user identification for customized user interfaces. Additionally, TI's RF4CE and Bluetooth Smart remote solutions make embedded and Internet- or cloud-based remotes a reality.

"Voice is changing the TV remote experience, bringing a new sense of simplicity and instant access to content, shows, and features otherwise hard to navigate with traditional remote controls and program guides," said Michael Thompson, executive vice president and general manager of Nuance Mobile, in a statement. "TI's RF4CE and Bluetooth Smart remote control solutions powered by Nuance's Dragon TV bring the connected TV to life and create a compelling and engaging experience."

Based on a single-chip SoC (CC2533 or CC2541 for ZigBee RF4CE or Bluetooth low energy respectively), TI's voice-enabled remote control solutions only require an external analog-to-digital converter; no external digital signal processing is needed for voice compression. The voice-enabled remote controls use TI's royalty-free RemoTI RF4CE stack and BLE-Stack software. TI offers manufacturers a complete RF4CE and Bluetooth Smart remote control product offering including simple button remotes, advanced remotes with pointing technology, and now voice-enabled.