BdSound and Vivoka Join Forces to Boost the World of Voice Assistants

BdSound and Vivoka, two European pioneers in voice technology, announced a strategic partnership to reshape the landscape of voice assistants. Through this collaboration, BdSound will leverage Vivoka's development framework allowing users to high-level construct tailored voice assistants. And BdSound's audio and speech processing technology will become an integral part of the acoustic front-end tools offered by Vivoka, promising to make voice assistants more accessible and customizable than ever before.

CEVA announced that it will make its CEVA-BX1 and CEVA-BX2 Audio DSPs and audio front-end software stack available for commercial developers through the Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V ecosystem. A Strategic Member of RISC-V International, CEVA is making its audio DSPs and software stack accessible for prototyping and production design through the Intel FPGA based pre-silicon development platform.

AONDevices, a Californian startup provider of ultra-low power, high-performance processors for edge AI applications, announced that engineering samples of its new AON1100 processor are now available. The AON1100 enables sensing capabilities in battery-powered always-on devices that need to support local wake words, voice commands, sound recognition, context recognition, and sensor fusion at high accuracy.

NXP expanded its already broad portfolio of voice enablement solutions with the acquisition of Retune DSP, the Denmark-based provider of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) software and algorithms for voice control and communication applications. Announced in July and now confirmed, the acquisition of Retune DSP adds three powerful voice DSP software products that will merge with NXP’s voice solutions. The combination with NXP’s broad customer base, global footprint and scale, promises to expand breakthrough voice solutions through combined R&D, sales force and customer support teams.

Great voice recognition can only start with great voice pickup. Just “OK” pickup will greatly compromise recognition accuracy and increase user frustration. The high speech quality you need demands a high-quality audio front-end. And if cost is no object, of course you can build a great solution. But can you also satisfy mid-range markets with attractive pricing?

Spotify partnered with DSP Concepts to build and deploy the audio front-end (AFE) software for its limited release of Car Thing, a dedicated smart player for the car. Spotify did the development for Car Thing using TalkTo, DSP Concepts’ proprietary AFE that acts as a ‘microphone cleaner’ by combining advanced signal processing techniques to create clean audio signals so Car Thing can detect voice commands regardless of road noise and other in-cabin sound.

STMicroelectronics has released an Amazon-qualified reference design package for smart connected devices leveraging Amazon AVS voice integration, which can be used to create Alexa Built-in products using simple microcontrollers (MCUs). The new reference design eases development of natural-language understanding and voice-based user interaction for smart-home devices and smart appliances, featuring an improved audio front end created with DSP Concepts for far-field audio detection.