Low-Power Software Solution Enables Always-On Voice User Interface
RAANANA, Israel, Dec. 19, 2017— Rubidium Ltd., a developer of embedded voice user interface technology, today announced that its voice trigger was integrated into the 66 Audio® PRO Voice wireless headphones, essentially the world’s first voice-triggered Bluetooth headphones with built-in Amazon Alexa. Users can simply say “Alexa” to start interacting with Amazon’s cloud-based voice service.
Using Rubidium’s voice trigger, headphones, headsets, speakers and other devices listen to users at all times. However, while always-on voice-activated AI assistants are ubiquitous in smartphones and smart speakers, their implementation in mobile, battery-powered wearables without direct connection to the cloud has been a long–time challenge.
Rubidium ported its always-on speech recognition engine to the Qualcomm® Bluetooth chip series as well as to other chips and cores, offering a tiny footprint, highly robust voice wakeup and speech recognition for mobile and wearable applications. It can even run while a headset is playing music, including support for Qualcomm aptX™ and AAC world-class music codecs.
“While in recent years voice wakeup has become a hot topic, Rubidium began deploying it in mass products over 15 years ago,” said Shlomo Peller, CEO and Founder of Rubidium. “Combining this vast experience with our unique speech recognition technology has enabled us to come up with such a miniature engine without compromising performance.”
“Rubidium’s trigger showed unprecedented tradeoff between footprint and performance,” said Kristian Kay, Founder and CEO of 66 Audio. “PRO Voice runs a sophisticated set of algorithms while maintaining low power consumption and communicating in real-time with our native iOS and Android app – MotionControl™. Our team worked closely with Rubidium to deliver an extraordinary voice experience to our customers.”
Rubidium expects additional voice-triggered headphones, hearables and wearables carrying its technology to hit the market in 2018.
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© 2017 Rubidium Ltd.
Amazon and Alexa are registered trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.
Qualcomm® and aptX™ are trademarks of Qualcomm Technologies International, Ltd.
66 Audio®, MotionControl™ and PRO Voice™ are registered trademarks of 66 Audio, LLC.
Bluetooth® is a registered trademark owned by the Bluetooth SIG, Inc.
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