Apple Updates All Hardware and Software at WWDC17 and Announces HomePod Speaker

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.

3PASS flex is HEAD acoustics new simulation system for measuring speech quality performance in the presence of background noise. It is particularly suited for testing multi-microphone systems, microphone arrays or beamforming microphones in real world conditions where multi-point noise simulation with flexible microphone and loudspeaker arrays is required. 3PASS flex reproduces any previously recorded sound field at distinct microphone positions, representative of typical use cases.

At Mobile World Congress 2017, Barcelona, Infineon Technologies and XMOS partner to deliver a new building block for voice recognition. It features a combination of Infineon’s BGT60TR24B 60GHz 2Tx/4Rx radar IC with accompanying antenna, 70dB SNR silicon microphone sensors, based on Infineon’s dual backplate MEMS technology, and an audio processor from XMOS. In combination, the solution provides far field voice capture by audio beamforming combined with radar target presence detection.