Voice is the most powerful yet under-utilized energy, that is getting popular last few years. With Google, Amazon, Apple’s products and assistant showing us power of giving instructions! Consumers segment is already popular for more & more voice integrated products, making convenience a by default category!
The smart appliance market is one of the fastest growing verticals in the smart home, with voice control representing a critical technology feature supporting it. According to research from SAR Insight, over 66M voice processors for smart appliances are expected to ship by 2024, representing a CAGR of 55% between 2019 and 2024.
Samsung in its FamilyHub (Connected hub for smart appliances) seem to have been using Knowles’s AISonic™ white Goods Standard Solution. AISonic is a new, complete development solution that enables fast and easy voice integration for smart appliances. Samsung choose AISonic as an enabler for far field voice recognition technology.
Key Feature of Knowles seems that it supports interoperability, allowing multiple voice assistants to be integrated into single device & enables users to talk to the other service of their choice in a secure manner by saying its name. Best part is solution can be integrated to broader ecosystem of smart appliance devices and allowing for better product development freedom.
AISonic also includes algorithm for an audio front end, suitable for use with Amazon Alexa assistant & other cloud based ASR APIs though the Knowles Open DSP partner program. Knowles integration partner Sensory Inc, provides the wake word engine for White Goods Solutions, enabling Amazon-certified voice wake and far-field voice recognition for memory-constrained smart appliances.
“As the smart home appliance market matures and continues to expand, support for voice interfaces is expected to become a highly requested feature that consumers look for in new appliances,” said Vikram Shrivastava, senior director, IoT Marketing at Knowles. “The ability to ask your refrigerator to read aloud your grocery inventory, play a recipe video while cooking, or ask your oven to pre-heat while you prepare dinner, all contribute to the user experience but often, OEMs and ODMs face reduced power and memory constraints when adding voice capabilities. These constraints can have an impact on usability – the AISonic Audio Edge Processor removes this friction by providing high performance in a small size, with high efficiency, privacy and compute power enabling customers to design modern products with far-field voice processing functionality for accurate listening. We also have an ecosystem of hardware system integrators that have developed modules to integrate with legacy appliance control boards.” – As per the interviews/press release.