Untethering virtual assistants from Wi-Fi

The hands-free personal assistant that you can wake on voice and talk to naturally has significantly gained popularity the last couple of years. This kind of technology made its debut not all that long ago as a feature of Motorola’s MotoX, a smartphone that had always-listening Moto Voice technology powered by Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree technology. Since then, the always-listening digital assistant quickly spread across mobile phones and PCs from several different brands, making phrases like, “Hey Siri,” “Okay Google,” and, “Hey Cortana,” commonplace.

Then, out of nowhere, Amazon successfully tried its hand at the personal assistant with the Echo, sporting a true natural language voice interface and Alexa cloud-based AI. It was initially marketed for music, but quickly expanded domain coverage to include weather, Q&A, recipes, and the ability to answer common questions. On top of that, Amazon also opened its platform up to third-party developers, allowing them to proliferate the skill sets available on the Alexa platform, with now more than 10,000 skills accessible to users. These skills allow Amazon’s Echo, Tap, and Dot, as well as the several new third-party Alexa-equipped products like Nucleus and Triby, to be used to access and control various IoT functions, from reading heart rates on Fitbits to ordering pizzas and controlling lights within the home.

Until recently, always-listening, hands-free assistants required a certain minimum power capability, restricting form factors to table top speakers or appliance devices that had to either be plugged in to an outlet or have a large battery. Also, Amazon’s Echo, Tap, and Dot all required a Wi-Fi connection for communicating with the Alexa AI engine to make use of its available skills. Unfortunately, this meant you were restricted to using Alexa within your home or Wif-Fi network. If you wanted to go on a run, the only way to ask Alexa for your step count or heart rate was to wait until you got back home.

This is changing now with technology like Sensory’s VoiceGenie, an always-listening embedded speech recognizer for wearables and hearables that runs in a low power mode on a Qualcomm/CSR Bluetooth chip. The solution takes a session border controller (SBC) music decoder and intertwines it with a speech recognition system so that while music is playing and the decoder is in-use, VoiceGenie is on and actively listening, allowing the Bluetooth device to listen for two keywords:

• “VoiceGenie,” which provides access to all the Bluetooth device’s and connected handset’s features.
• “Alexa,” which enables Alexa through a smartphone, and doesn’t require Wi-Fi.

To give an example of how this works, a Bluetooth headset’s volume, pairing process, battery strength, or connection status can only be controlled or monitored through the device itself, so VoiceGenie handles those controls with no touching required. VoiceGenie can also read the incoming caller’s name and ask the user if they want to answer or ignore. Additionally, VoiceGenie can call up the phone’s assistant like Google Assistant, Siri, or Cortana, to ask by voice for a call to be made or a song to be played. By saying, “Alexa,” the user can access the Alexa service directly from their Bluetooth headsets while out and about, using their smartphone as the connection to the Alexa cloud.

Today’s consumer wants a personalized assistant that knows them, is convenient to use, keeps their secrets safe, and helps them in their daily lives. This help can be accessing information, getting answers to questions or intelligently controlling your home environment. It’s very difficult to accomplish this for privacy and power reasons solely using cloud-based AI technology. There needs to be embedded intelligence on devices, and it needs to run at low power. A low-power embedded voice assistant that adds an intelligent voice interface to portable and wearable devices, while also adding Alexa functionality to them, can address those needs.