SAR Insight & Consulting Estimates 335 Million Voice Assistant Smart Devices in Use in China by 2023

Smart devices have proliferated across everyday life for Chinese people, offering considerable opportunities for global companies operating within the AI space – specifically focused on the voice assistant market. According to the latest report from SAR Insight & Consulting – China Voice Market – the average Chinese consumer has become much more positive about the benefits of owning connected devices helping to drive greater interest in the interactive voice functionality.

SoundHound Inc., the voice-enabled AI and conversational intelligence technology company, announced a strategic partnership with Honda Motor to accelerate the development of a voice-enabled AI assistant. Using SoundHound's Houndify Voice AI Platform, the AI Assistant will support highly sophisticated and natural interactions with speed and accuracy, leveraging its proprietary Speech-to-Meaning and Deep Meaning Understanding technologies, and intelligence in voice recognition and understanding.

From the company behind Travis the Translator, the Travis Blue wireless speaker, and the Volareo music smart speaker, comes a new generation of language translation device. Travis Touch launched in Indiegogo and promises to support 100+ languages in a new more sophisticated device. Having raised 1.8 million USD on their first device by selling 110,000 units globally, Travis now managed to reach its goal of raising 50,000 USD in less than 16 minutes with Travis Touch.

Because every R&D department in the planet is currently looking at implementing voice, and everyone's looking at audioXpress for guidance on how to design a smart speaker, in this edition Kevin Connor, shares his insider knowledge on the topic. Connor, a Cirrus Logic engineer, explains how to provide audio and voice solutions, and design products that sound great and respond reliably to voice commands, regardless of backend service. This article was originally published in audioXpress, January 2018.

Fluent.ai Inc., the company that claims to have created "the world’s first acoustic-only multi-lingual voice interface" is now offering an intuitive and flexible Platform-as-a-Service, FaaS, for developers. According to the company, the platform allows implementations of the company's artificial-intelligence solution to "quickly customize reliable and robust voice capabilities for consumer devices and cloud service applications."

IBM unveiled an experimental release of Project Intu, a new, system-agnostic platform designed to enable embodied cognition. The new platform allows developers to embed IBM Watson artificial intelligence functions into various end-user device form factors, offering a next generation architecture for building cognitive-enabled experiences. The initiative allows developers to extend Watson speech, language, vision and empathy capabilities to new form factors.