Nevo.ai Expands Virtual Assistant Capabilities

Universal Electronics, a provider of universal control and sensing technologies for the smart home, will be introducing new capabilities and support across a variety of home entertainment and smart home devices for nevo.ai virtual assistant services.

Since the introduction of nevo.ai as an integrated white-label virtual assistant in Nevo Butler, UEI has been bringing new capabilities and support across devices such as smart TVs, set-top boxes, and home gateways.

Nevo Butler is an entertainment and smart home hub with nevo.ai built-in to enable far-field voice assistance. Powered by QuickSet Cloud, this product can enable natural voice control to installed devices in the home that are not addressable through other assistants.

This year, UEI is introducing nevo.ai as a white-label virtual assistant service with a range of new capabilities, enabling integration across a variety of home entertainment and smart home devices. These include the following:

• A conversational interface to interact with a growing list of devices in the home.
• Support for far-field voice through Nevo Butler or near-field voice using voice-enabled remote control platforms.
• New graphical interface.
• Interoperability as a Service powered by QuickSet Cloud.
• QuickSet 5.0, including the latest advancements in QuickSet Cloud blending entertainment and smart home with built-in support for IoT device management, dashboards and analytics, and native support for Zigbee 3.0
• Intelligent sound events that provide private and secure context-aware services across home security and entertainment control. With an integrated, look-back capability so important events are automatically captured. Enabling a variety of new features, such as audio ducking, sound triggers and snapshots for home security, and a more intuitive entertainment audio control.
• Virtual Agent service powered by nevo.ai available on-device, a support website, or integrated in branded mobile apps.

Nevo.ai is built on Microsoft's open-source and extensible virtual assistant solution accelerator to deliver tailored experiences directly to customers through a variety of channels.

"By making nevo.ai service available across more devices and screens, we will offer an upgrade path for QuickSet Cloud-enabled platforms to benefit from our device interoperability, device knowledge graph, and virtual agent capabilities available through rich conversational interfaces, on and off device," said Arsham Hatambeiki, senior vice president of product and technology at Universal Electronics, in a statement. "Microsoft's vision for a multi-assistant future fully aligns with ours, and we continue to collaborate on new services to enable this future for smarter and more capable devices at home."

"Today and in the future, we assume every home product will offer immediate and on-device assistance through natural conversational interfaces, in a personalized and trusted experience. By partnering with UEI on nevo.ai and QuickSet Cloud, we will enable UEI customers to build on an open virtual assistant solution accelerator for millions of home products, powered by Microsoft Azure AI and IoT services," Lili Cheng, corporate vice president of Conversational AI at Microsoft, in a statement.