DSP Concepts Partners with Cambridge Consultants to Accelerate Audio and Voice Innovation

Cambridge Consultants, part of Capgemini, is partnering with DSP Concepts, an audio platform provider, offering its deep audio product development expertise and technology to companies in the DSP Concepts ecosystem.<.p/>

This gives DSP Concepts' customers access to Cambridge's integrated systems expertise to build and deploy product-differentiating features at scale. In addition, Cambridge gains access to DSP Concepts' Audio Weaver platform, where it will also add its own Voice Activity Detector (VAD) .

Cambridge has developed a range of audio technologies, from the CMOS Bluetooth chip to Sapphyre, the digital signal processing core that underpins many of Cambridge's ultra-low power audio applications.

Cambridge applies techniques in wireless audio-visual, sound beamforming, wake-on-word, echo cancellation, machine learning, deep learning, and voice detection.

Cambridge is making its VAD available on the Audio Weaver platform, where it can be integrated into always-on/always-available voice-enabled products in the home and elsewhere. Its signal processing and artificial intelligence team has been working closely with DSP Concepts to demonstrate a custom module based on the WebRTC VAD for offline applications. Cambridge previously used the same technology to demonstrate Ecoutez, a low-power VAD design.

The WebRTC VAD for Audio Weaver is available as a single custom module block that can be dragged and dropped via the interface into audio workflows. For each input block it returns a zero or non-zero value indicating whether non-speech or speech is present. It accepts float input data of block sizes of 10, 20 or 30 ms and an audio sample rate of 8 kHz, which allows trade-offs in accuracy and responsiveness for specific applications. It also supports real-time sensitivity control, which makes it more resilient to background noise.

Audio Weaver already has several wake word engines optimized for Google Voice Assistant (GVA) and Alexa Voice Service (AVS), and Cambridge's WebRTC VAD was specifically added for deployment in voice-enabled products that don't run on a cloud service. Like wake word engines built for GVA and AVS devices, this can be combined with TalkTo, DSP Concepts' audio front end that eliminates noise for voice control in noisy and unpredictable environments.

"Audio Weaver is an impressive platform for embedded audio development that allows both platform-abstracted designs and platform-specific optimizations. Crucially, it includes the automated real-time systems checks and monitoring for audio tuning, which is critical for mitigating production delays and accelerating time to market. The environment allows product developers to focus on the differentiating features that drive sales, which is exactly where our product and service development capability provides most value," said Robert Tan, head of signal processing and artificial intelligence at Cambridge Consultants, in a statement.
"Cambridge Consultants has a stellar reputation across a wide range of industry verticals, with a proven track record of helping brands produce cutting-edge product and human interface designs. We';re excited to work with Cambridge Consultants and harness their technology strategy and development expertise for product makers building on Audio Weaver, accelerating innovation and time to market for our customers," said Michael Maia, vice president of marketing at DSP Concepts, in a statement.