Amazon Announces Voice Interoperability Initiative with Leading Technology Companies

Amazon, Baidu, Sony, BMW, Microsoft, Bose, Tencent, Orange, Salesforce, Harman, Logitech, Verizon, Sonos, Spotify, Sound United, and more are joining forces to promote choice by supporting multiple, interoperable voice services on a single device. The idea is to offer multiple, simultaneous wake words, so users can access multiple voice services by simply saying the corresponding wake word – from Alexa and Cortana to Orange’s Djingo, Salesforce’s Einstein, and more.

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.