Sensory Blog

While voice seems to power the user experience of nearly every technology product we own today, 10 years ago the concept of using keywords (now known as wake words) to wake up devices mostly pertained to science fiction. Fast forward to today. Wake words are everywhere, from low-power devices like our smart watches, smartphones hearables, and portable devices, to more…

Can a small embedded custom voice assistant take on 800 pound cloud gorillas? Before answering this and diving into the how, why, and how much, let me backup and talk a little bit about testing and accuracy. Testing speech recognition performance across speech engines in a fair manner is VERY difficult. The tests need to be representative of the real…

Using our hands and bodies has been the dominant means of control since the dawn of time. This of course is natural for activities like farming and hunting and made a lot of sense as service businesses emerged. As our machines got more intricate and complex, touch made a lot of sense for mechanical devices, and interestingly enough even in…

Everyone knows that the use of voice assistants is exploding. Just returning from CES, it was amazing to see the number of booths that support Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Nevertheless, recent research from Edison-NPR is showing that US household adoption of voice assistant applications is slowing down. Read the full blog at Embedded Computing.

In the old days of corporate America an “assistant” would bring you coffee. Today the “assistant” is Alexa or Google or some other voice assistant, and they don’t directly bring you coffee…yet. FROM MUSIC TO FOOD ORDERING Over 30% of U.S. adults now have at least one smart speaker, 60% have used a voice assistant on a smartphone, and the…