QuickLogic Releases Amazon-Qualified Alexa Reference Design for Hearables

March 4 2021, 00:10
QuickLogic released an Amazon-qualified QuickFeather AVS Reference Design that enables OEMs and ODMs to evaluate and develop their own smart hearable products quickly and easily. This kit integrates the Alexa voice-initiated Close-Talk experience, enabling a broad set of battery-powered applications to communicate directly with Alexa for a multitude of use cases. In addition, OEMs and ODMs can optionally integrate multiple AI-based motion, sound and other AI use cases based on SensiML’s AI Software Platform, which already has native support for the development kit.
 

QuickLogic Corporation is a California-based developer of ultra-low power multi-core voice-enabled SoCs, embedded FPGA IP, and Endpoint AI solutions. The Amazon-qualified QuickFeather AVS Reference Design enables OEMs and ODMs to evaluate and develop their own smart hearable products quickly and easily. This kit integrates the Alexa voice-initiated Close-Talk experience, enabling a broad set of battery-powered applications to communicate directly with the Alexa Voice Service for a multitude of use cases.

This is the first available, Close-Talk qualified smart hearable reference design based on QuickLogic's EOS S3 ultra-low power Arm Cortex-M4-based Voice Processor + eFPGA System-on-Chip. The reference design is built on QuickLogic's Open Reconfigurable Computing (QORC) initiative, and QuickLogic's QuickFeather 100% open source development kit. The EOS S3 integrates Sensory's Low Power Sound Detection (LPSD) technology, with DSP Concepts' TalkTo noise suppression and beamforming technology, and Alexa Wake Word engine technology to enable a superior user experience and long battery life.

In addition to the very low power, voice-initiated Alexa voice recognition capability enabled by the EOS S3 platform, OEMs and ODMs can optionally integrate multiple AI-based motion, sound and other AI use cases based on SensiML's AI Software Platform, which already has native support for the QuickFeather development kit. 

Following evaluation with this reference design, manufacturers can take the next step in product development using the same QuickFeather development kit, or design their own hardware.

The QuickFeather AVS Reference Design features the Alexa Wake Word Engine (WWE) running in the EOS S3 voice processor, with a hardware-optimized Low Power Sound Detection (LPSD) technology from Sensory, and support for one or two microphone use cases with DSP Concepts' TalkTo noise suppression and beamforming technology.

"The age of the smart hearable has arrived, and our always-listening, Alexa Close-Talk reference design is the ideal platform for developing next generation AI-enabled hearable products," says Brian Faith, CEO of QuickLogic. "OEMs and ODMs can use this readily available design along with the QuickFeather development kit as a sandbox for their own product development with the comfort that we have already gone through the AVS certification process on our reference design with Amazon. The fact that we have built all of this on our QuickLogic Open Reconfigurable Computing platform, which integrates with the SensiML AI Software Platform, makes it that much easier for users to innovate in familiar development environments, speeding time-to-market and reducing risk."

QuickLogic develops low power, multi-core semiconductor platforms and solutions for Artificial Intelligence (AI), voice and sensor processing. The solutions include embedded FPGA IP (eFPGA) for hardware acceleration and pre-processing, and heterogeneous multi-core SoCs that integrate eFPGA with other processors and peripherals. The Analytics Toolkit from its recently acquired wholly-owned subsidiary, SensiML Corporation, completes the end-to-end solution with accurate sensor algorithms using AI technology.

The QuickLogic QuickFeather AVS reference design for Amazon is available now and can be ordered from QuickLogic's online store. www.quicklogic.com/avs
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