All Apple WWDC 2017 Audio Announcements

The audio industry was once again shaken to its foundations by Apple's announcements at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2017. The product updates and sneak peeks made at this Apple Special Event, on June 5, 2017, were extremely rich in surprising technology revelations, even though its implications might not become clear until a few weeks or months later. After all, the WWDC conference - a developer's conference - is traditionally where Apple builds the foundations for what will be its underlying short-term/long-term strategies, serving mainly to motivate developers and strategic partners.

Apple's opening keynote for its Worldwide Developers Conference 2017 (WWDC17) at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, was a swirl of long expected announcements, wrapped in surprising underlying technology revelations. Among the many announcements was the preview of Apple's new home music speaker with built-in-far-field voice recognition powered by Apple Siri, the HomePod. As expected, the design is a powerful combination of electroacoustic mastery, digital processing and smart connectivity.

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.