Google Introduces Nest Audio Smart Speaker With Focus on Music Reproduction

Google held the company's traditional hardware announcements event. Apart from a new mandatory phone, the star of the event was the new Nest Audio smart speaker, bigger and more powerful than the Google Home that it replaces. Rumored for months, the new smart speaker reflects the hard work by a dedicated engineering team, resulting in a better overall speaker design, but also improved multi-room streaming features. Inside, there's more intelligence to support voice commands locally, and there's even a microphone "privacy" mute switch, when required.

Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, the inventor of mp3 and primary developer of the xHE-AAC and MPEG-H Audio standards, announced that NXP Semiconductors has licensed Fraunhofer’s MPEG audio SDK. The complete software package covers four generations of audio codecs, from legacy MPEG Layer-1/2/3 to the next-generation MPEG-H 3D Audio standard and the AAC codec family, including xHE-AAC. NXP will incorporate these codecs in home entertainment product development, from set-top boxes and soundbars to smart speakers.

Orfeo SoundWorks’s Bluetooth Earphones have been selected as a CES 2016 Innovation Awards Honoree in the Headphones category. The company introduced its InnerMic technology which, combined with VoiceRecovery processing technology allows for total intelligibility in any noisy environment. Basically, the concept consists in placing a microphone inside of the earphones to capture inner voice and block out all sound interference.