Bluetooth SIG Announces Auracast Broadcast Audio Capability

When the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the trade association that oversees Bluetooth technology, announced the upcoming release of LE Audio at CES 2020, the new specification promised two major benefits: the new LC3 codec to provide higher audio quality with the same battery life, and Broadcast Audio, enabling personal and location-based Audio Sharing. Now the Bluetooth SIG announced a new consumer brand for what was previously known as Audio Sharing, now as Auracast broadcast audio.

Cadence Design Systems announced the new Cadence Tensilica HiFi 1 DSP, delivering increased voice- and music-processing performance with optimal neural network capability in a compact footprint with ultra-low energy, improving the user experience and extending battery life. The Tensilica HiFi 1 DSP is now the smallest and lowest power member of the HiFi DSP family, developed for battery-constrained applications, such as mobile, hearables, wearables, automotive, and connected devices.

Qualcomm Technologies International, unveiled the Qualcomm QCC305x SoCs, designed specifically to help brands differentiate across a range of tiers in the very fast-moving truly wireless earbud category. The new SoCs are designed to meet demand for advanced wireless audio use cases, and enable end-to-end support for the new Bluetooth LE Audio standard. The QCC305x series also adds support for ultra-low-power digital ANC technology, Qualcomm Adaptive ANC, Qualcomm TrueWireless Mirroring, and wake word activated voice assistants.

DSP Group announced TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers SDK support for its DBMD7 family of low-cost, high-performance, multicore AI and DSP processors. The SDK for the DBMD7 allows developers of AI and high-performance machine learning applications on edge devices to avoid latencies and ensure end-user privacy devices to cost-effectively deploy high-performance machine learning (ML) inference at the edge to avoid network latencies, minimize power consumption, ensure end-user privacy, and free up scarce network bandwidth.

With many audio manufacturers and consumer electronic companies experimenting development with voice recognition applications, Google naturally wants to make it easy as possible for anyone to get familiarized with the company's Google Assistant SDK, to implement voice interaction. Billy Rutledge, Director of AIY Projects at Google, recently revealed a new voice recognition DIY kit and voice HAT for the Raspberry Pi.