Sensory Powers Voice-Enabled Farberware Microwaves

Farberware microwaves became the first of many home devices to feature a custom, private voice interface from Sensory.

The Farberware FM11VABK voice-controlled microwave oven features Sensory's TrulyHandsfree and TrulyNatural technologies to provide all the benefits of a custom voice assistant without the privacy compromises of cloud-based, general-purpose assistant platforms

Sensory's voice technologies operate 100 percent on device, keeping voice data completely private, with no data collection from the product and no recordings sent to the cloud.

Due to the edge architecture of Sensory's domain-specific assistant technology, customers don't have to deal with Wi-Fi, apps, third-party hardware, or cloud-connected assistants always listening in. Just plug the microwave in and it is ready to understand numerous voice commands, such as, "Open door," "Cook popcorn," "Set timer to one minute 36 seconds," "Defrost," or "Reheat for two minutes."

"We're at a turning point with voice UI technology. People love the convenience of mainstream voice assistants, but privacy, accuracy, complicated setup, and connectivity issues continue to be a growing concern among users. These concerns have intensified the need for custom private voice assistants," said Todd Mozer, CEO of Sensory, in a statement. "Sensory's customer base used to be driven by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung that licensed Sensory technology to improve their general assistant offerings. Today we're seeing a major shift, with most of our customers being brands that want to own and manage their own private custom voice assistant platforms."

The Farberware microwave is an example of what can be done at the edge. The large vocabulary recognizer with a custom statistical language model and NLU can support complexactions like, "Cook four baked potatoes." The Sensory NLU engine looks for intents within a limited domain.

Sensory's product testing division, Vocalize.ai, evaluated the Farberware device for speech recognition accuracy and task completion rate, and when benchmarked against the Amazon Basics Microwave with Alexa, the Farberware microwave accurately recognized and executed 68 percent more spoken commands than Alexa.