Retune DSP has built a strong reputation as a one-stop-shop and full-service software supplier delivering a complete voice control stack including multi-microphone beamforming, multi-channel acoustic echo cancellation and wake-word engines. As NXP describes the acquisition, the Retune DSP range of solutions will expand its strategy in "The Voice of Things," trying to turn all connected devices into voice-enabled smart devices.
"Voice – human speech – is the most natural human-machine-interface (HMI). We want voice control, and crave more of it, along with greater speed and accuracy," says Joe Yu, IoT Segment, Edge Processing Business Line, NXP Semiconductors. "While touch interfaces aren’t going away anytime soon, we’re seeing more use cases for voice as an easier way to control devices and systems in our homes, offices, cars and public spaces. Even more so during these times of COVID-19," he adds.
"To bring affordable voice control to more and more devices, NXP Semiconductors is committed to reducing the design effort for our customers to further help reduce the cost and complexity of the overall system solutions. Our goal is to help developers everywhere add voice control to almost everything, from consumer electronics and home control applications to industrial and automotive applications. The use cases are endless. The key is to offer a comprehensive portfolio of silicon- and software-based voice solutions scaling across NXP’s EdgeVerse processing continuum. We believe Retune offers the right DSP software technology to help NXP reach the next level in delivering high-performance voice control solutions to customers worldwide," NXP states in the acquisition announcement.
Headquartered in the greater Copenhagen area, Retune DSP provides highly accurate, small-footprint, low-power voice processing solutions that are popular with a growing customer base. The company has built a strong reputation and loyal customer base as a one-stop shop and full-service software supplier delivering a complete voice control stack including multi-microphone beamforming, multi-channel acoustic echo cancellation and wake-word engines.
When developers required extremely high levels of detection accuracy within tiny model sizes, Retune DSP stepped up and worked closely with customers to deliver the right voice solution for their application needs. Retune DSP’s three voice DSP software products - Conversa, VoiceSeeker, and VoiceSpot - will merge with NXP’s current voice solutions portfolio.
Conversa is a high-performance, multi-microphone, full-duplex voice processing software suite that provides total control of uplink and downlink audio. Conversa delivers exceptional sound quality for hands-free speech processing applications including Bluetooth speakerphones, conference phones, headphones and headsets, true wireless stereo (TWS) and automotive voice solutions.
VoiceSeeker is a state-of-the-art multi-microphone voice control audio front-end DSP solution offering high-performance beamforming and multi-channel acoustic echo cancellation to deliver exceptional trigger word detection and payload accuracy. Retune’s algorithm can simultaneously process up to 24 independent acoustic echo cancellers per core, unlocking the potential of voice control in multi-channel home theater environments. Effective beyond 10 meters, VoiceSeeker’s beamformer technology is ideal for far-field voice control applications.
Finally, VoiceSpot is a highly accurate wake-word engine leveraging Retune’s proprietary ML-based pattern recognition technology. Retune’s high-performance voice triggers have ultra-small memory footprints, requiring fewer MIPS than competing wake-word engines. The combination of VoiceSpot and VoiceSeeker software provides a complete front-end voice control solution, enabling developers to move quickly through the software integration process. VoiceSpot also supports customer-defined voice trigger words or phrases.
"Retune’s DSP software is an ideal fit for our processor continuum – complementing the broad spectrum of voice control solutions offered by NXP and our voice ecosystem partners. We believe this strategic acquisition will complement the NXP brewed voice intelligent technology (VIT) wake-word engine with its audio front end, bringing scale and new market opportunities to Retune’s market-proven voice processing, beamforming, acoustic echo cancellation and wake-word engine technologies," the company adds.
NXP already offers a broad range of solutions for adding voice control directly to any device. From flexible implementations to turnkey solutions, NXP now offers solutions for edge processing all the way to larger memory options, more powerful Arm cores, integrated DSPs and additional on-chip accelerator and security options. To accelerate time to market, NXP offers its MCUXpresso SDK development environment and powerful ML technologies for manufacturers developing in-house voice applications.
www.retune-dsp.com
www.nxp.com/voice
