Voice Capture Challenges: The Threshold of the Golden Age of Voice

Voice processing and recognition leading to the development of voice-based personal assistants is one of the decade’s greatest achievements and provides a unique opportunity for the audio industry. Leveraging those sophisticated technologies now available to the consumer electronics industry makes the investment on new designs much more exciting. In this article, Mike Klasco provides an introduction to the voice capture, signal processing and voice recognition challenges. This article was originally published in audioXpress, December 2018.

Promoted every year by the market research firm Futuresource Consulting, Audio Collaborative 2019 full-day conference on November 7 was invaluable, with Futuresource's leading market analysts and researchers sharing some of the latest stats and trends on the topics in the agenda, combined with great panels and in-between keynotes. This is the third of my reports, originally published in The Audio Voice newsletter.

Qualcomm made two important announcements for audio developers, both bound to significantly impact the fast-growing market of smart speakers and new generation whole-home audio systems. The San Diego company announced the new QCS400 family of audio SoCs and the Smart Audio Platform 400 development kit, bringing smart speakers high-performance processing, Qualcomm AI Engine, superior connectivity, and multiple advanced audio and visual display capabilities in a single, power-optimized chip architecture.

The IBC show is always an important event to remind us of some key perspectives having to do with audio technology, content production, and distribution, which are at the core of our interests. Just like music is now predominantly available on streaming services, radio and television content are now being distributed over the Internet, while movies and lots of other content is available directly to all of us in multiple platforms and services. This article was published originally in The Audio Voice newsletter.

It's been an interesting week! Just prior to the IBC 2017 show, Apple made its traditional event for the launch of the new iPhone 8 and iPhone X (and those Augmented Reality demos were amazing!), also debuting the new Apple TV 4K. And before Samsung and all the other Smartphone manufacturers start announcing their own versions of "X" models, we had a series of interesting corporate and technology announcements, culminating by Amazon's announcement of a series of new Alexa-based hardware devices...

Amazon is not resting on its laurels in voice personal assistants. The company continues to severely undercut Google's ambitions with the Google Home, Assistant and Chromecast products, while jumping ahead to compete head to head with Apple and undermining Apple's plans for Siri and the smart home. The company just announced a completely revamped line of Echo speakers with lower prices and improved everything, as well as new classes of Echo devices.