Communicating with the Amazon Alexa cloud from a Bluetooth device

(see video demo below!)

Approved by Amazon and Qualcomm, Rubidium’s solution offers a best of breed software-only implementation enabling Bluetooth®, IoT and other low-power devices to have hands-free connection with the Alexa Voice Service, otherwise known as Amazon Alexa.  Rubidium’s implementation is an integrated end-to-end package, consisting of one or more of the following software components:

• Micro-embedded always-on “Alexa” voice trigger, with superb accuracy and very low power drain
• Bluetooth firmware for handling the communication between the Bluetooth device and a smartphone
• Smartphone app, communicating with the Bluetooth device and with the Alexa cloud

More and more consumer devices are attempting to take advantage of Amazon’s voice-controlled AI assistant known as “Alexa”. Amazon’s AVS and its associated skill-sets have gained immense popularity and are now used in homes, offices and more.

However, since it is impractical to keep every single device communicating with this cloud all the time, users are typically required to start engaging with Alexa by first saying “Alexa” to wake-up the service. The detection of the wake-up phrase is called Voice Trigger, and has to run directly on the front-end device, namely the Bluetooth device. It is an always-on embedded software algorithm that must have extremely high detection accuracy while still consuming very little power, since some of these Bluetooth devices have very little batteries.

Rubidium stepped up to this challenge and has developed the best performing and most efficient implementation of this voice trigger, approved by Amazon and Qualcomm (CSR division). It is available on Qualcomm’s CSR8670 Bluetooth chip as well as multiple other hardware platform and DSP cores.

Rubidium’s “Alexa” voice trigger implementation can be integrated into customers’ products and applications, including Android and iOS based Apps. It could be used as a separate solution or combined with other Voice User Interface products from Rubidium.

A comparative test of Rubidium’s Alexa voice trigger has demonstrated superior performance and substantially smaller footprint than alternative solutions available today.

To complement the support of customers requesting a complete AVS access solution, Rubidium offers additional software needed to establish the connection to Alexa via Bluetooth. This covers both software running on the Bluetooth device and a smartphone App connecting with both the Bluetooth device and the Amazon cloud.

We would love to discuss your needs. Please watch our demo video and request a demo!