Syntiant Accelerates Audio and Voice Product Development With New TinyML Development Board

Syntiant unveiled its TinyML Development Board, an easy-to-use developer kit aimed at both technical and non-technical users for building machine learning-powered applications in smart products, such as speech commands, wake word detection, acoustic event detection and other sensor use cases. The new machine learning development board allows developers to build low-power voice, audio and sensor applications using Edge Impulse’s Embedded ML platform.

Syntiant Corp., the AI for edge devices chip technology company from Irvine, California, announced the availability of its latest Syntiant NDP120 Neural Decision Processor (NDP), a new generation of special purpose chips for audio and sensor processing for always-on applications in battery-powered devices. The low-power Syntiant Core 2 technology in the NDP120 processor delivers 25x the tensor throughput of the core technology found in earlier Syntiant NDP devices that are currently shipping in high volumes.

DSP processing software specialist firm, Alango has been working to port the company's Voice Enhancement Package (VEP) to the NXP i.MX RT600 cross-over processor family, which is optimized for 32-bit immersive audio applications combining a high-performance Cadence Tensilica Hi-Fi 4 audio DSP core with a next-generation Cortex-M33 core. VEP is a set of Alango proprietary far-field voice enhancement technologies developed to improve human to machine interaction in a variety of applications.

After reviewing my notes from CES 2018 and the announcements from NXP, I decided it was fitting to share some parts of my interview with Martyn Humphries, vice president and general manager Media IoT and i.MX Applications Processors at NXP (and former Freescale executive). Basically, we discussed the environment that lead NXP to create its i.MX 8M single-chip media application processors, currently the most advanced integrated platform available for audio manufacturers.

NXP has teamed up with Arrow Electronics, Synaptics and Amazon to develop the Synaptics AudioSmart 2-Mic and NXP Pico i.MX7Dual Development Kit for Amazon Alexa Voice Service (AVS). This newly available development kit is one of the first to be qualified with production-ready system-on-chip (SoC), voice processor, and the AVS Device SDK. It enables device makers to quickly and cost-effectively integrate Alexa into a fully functioning prototype and then take that work into design for manufacturing and production.