Voice Application Opportunities for the Audio Industry

In previous editorials, I have highlighted the important role of smart speakers in promoting the user case for voice personal assistants (VPAs) and voice recognition applications - given the ideal combination of far-field microphone arrays with a complete audio ecosystem that encompasses digital signal processing, acoustic echo cancelation, noise cancellation, and many other technologies. This opens significant opportunities for the audio industry, given we understand the challenges.

SiriusXM announced that its 200+ channels – featuring Howard Stern, commercial-free music, plus live sports, news, entertainment, comedy, and more – are now available to SiriusXM subscribers in the US with Amazon Alexa. Users can simply ask Alexa to play SiriusXM channels by saying, for example, "Alexa, play… …Howard Stern… Alt Nation… The Beatles Channel… SiriusXM Progress… E Street Radio… Real Jazz… (and much more) …on SiriusXM"

During its voice and music developer conference held recently in Shenzhen, China, Qualcomm made two exciting audio announcements. The company announced its new Smart Audio Platform to help manufacturers accelerate the development and commercialization of smart and networked speakers. Qualcomm also announced multiple new audio platforms for next-gen wireless speakers, headphones and hearables, each one uniquely tailored to support new market demands, particularly as consumers rapidly adopt wireless audio devices.

The new miniDSP UMA-8 is a high-performance yet low cost multichannel USB microphone array built around XMOS multicore technology, designed for voice-recognition application development. Seven high-performance MEMS microphones are configured in a circular arrangement to provide high-quality voice capture for a wide range of applications. Leveraging the onboard DSP processing, the UMA-8 supports voice algorithms including beamforming, noise reduction, acoustic echo cancellation and de-reverb.