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European Automakers to Add Alibaba <span style='color:red'>Voice</span> Assistant to Cars

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European Automakers to Add Alibaba Voice Assistant to Cars

Ahead of this week’s Beijing Motor Show, three European car manufacturers have said that they will add Alibaba’s smart voice assistant to smart devices compatible with their connected car apps.Daimler, Audi, and Volvo car owners in China will be able to use Alibaba’s Tmall Genie voice-controlled assistant to monitor fuel levels, mileage, and engine and battery status, as well as control car doors, windows, and air conditioning from home via voice command. The feature is expected to launch in the near future — Volvo plans to use the Tmall Genie service on its XC90, S90, and XC60 models; Daimler and Audi haven’t yet specified which will implement the voice assistant.Earlier this year at CES, Alibaba announced a partnership with Mediatek to develop its own smart mesh connectivity solution to support Bluetooth mesh networking. While that announcement was focused on connectivity, Alibaba had already been working with the fabless semiconductor company for its voice assistant, using Mediatek’s MT8516 application processor for audio and microphone processing. The MT8516 integrates a quad-core, 64-bit Arm Cortex-A35 MPCore operating at up to 1.3 GHz and features interfaces such as I2Sx2 (four channels), TDM (up to eight channels), and PDM inputs (two channels) for microphone voice input control and connected audio products.The automaker partnerships are with Alibaba’s A.I. Labs, its in-house research unit for developing artificial intelligence-powered consumer applications, as part of its IoT initiative. The lab is also working to integrate its AI platform into vehicle operating systems so users will be able to control Tmall Genie-compatible home appliances from their cars. Alibaba said that it would use A.I. Labs’ voiceprint technology to ensure that the devices can only execute commands when activated by the voice of authorized users.Daimler also plans to leverage geofencing technology — developed by Alibaba Cloud’s IoT division — to automatically turn on or off lighting, thermostats, and other home appliances when they drive past a designated area near their homes.Tmall Genie was launched in July 2017 and has sold over 2 million units in China to date. Cars seem to be the next frontier for this service. Market research firm Counterpoint Insights forecasts that more than 125 million connected passenger cars would be shipped between 2018 and 2022, with the market increasing 270%. The report pointed to fast-growing adoption in China as one of the key drivers.“Cars are an environment, alongside the home and the office, where individuals spend a significant amount of time, and which through connectivity can become an important part of life,” said Lijuan Chen, head of Alibaba A.I. Labs, in a press statement. “Identifying how to serve car users with our smart home assistant Tmall Genie is one of our top priorities.”

Key word：

Automakers,Alibaba

Release time：2018-04-24 00:00 reading：2450 Continue reading>>

<span style='color:red'>Voice</span> and AI Explosion Rocks CES

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Voice and AI Explosion Rocks CES

　　Voice, connectivity and AI took center stage at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. If this year’s CES is any indication, these three building blocks will compose the holy trinity of consumer electronics devices that will drive the market in 2018 and further into the future.　　Voice assistants are now poised to move into wearables, headphones, baby monitors, lamps, TV remotes and vehicles. Paul Beckmann, founder and chief technology officer of DSP Concepts, told EE Times, “We are witnessing a Cambrian explosion around voice.”　　At CES, Baidu, known as “China’s Google,” shouted out most loudly for voice by unveiling and opening to developers its Duer OS-based platform. Neither its voice-enabled lamp, ceiling-mounted projector nor screen need Alexa or Google Assist. A growing number of vendors are gravitating toward voice, as Baidu loves to say, at “China speed.”　　Connectivity in consumer devices is already a given. The next necessity is the ability to “mix and match” different wireless networks, stressed Silicon Labs CEO Tyson Tuttle. Casually slapping onto IoT devices a connectivity chip originally designed for smartphones will no longer suffice, he explained. Systems need dynamic multi-protocol software and the ability to time-slice different wireless networks.　　While AI dominates attention as a key enabler for highly automated vehicles, Gideon Wertheizer, CEO of Ceva, told us, “I see AI getting out of the fantasy world.” Vendors are now trying to “set up parameters to use AI to solve specific problems in a random environment,” he explained.　　In other words, companies are learning to use AI in bite-size and apply it to specific tasks, rather than depending on AI to solve the world’s problems.　　Voice goes on the road　　Voice is going to be critical both in the home and on the road.　　Bosch announced at CES its plan to seat its voice assistant behind the wheel. “We are putting an end to the button chaos in the cockpit,” declared Dirk Hoheisel, a member of the board of management of Robert Bosch GmbH. Elektrobit promised at CES that it will be among the first Amazon Alexa automotive software integrators.　　As it unveiled its Duer OS-based Apollo 2.0 platform, dubbed “Android for automated vehicles,” Baidu asserted that voice assistance will be an integral part of the platform. Qi Lu, Baidu's vice chairman, said, “There will be no border between a home and a vehicle. Whatever you can do at home, you should be able to do it in cars.”　　Whether at home or in vehicles, isolating voice and sending clear signals all the way to the cloud is very hard, Ceva’s Wertheizer pointed out. “We are surrounded by noise.” Naturally, solutions for homes and cars must be able to handle a set of very different noise environments.　　No standard voice algorithms　　Complicating matters is the absence of any standard voice algorithms in the industry. “Everyone has its own proprietary algorithms to deal with voice,” observed Ceva CEO Gideon Wertheizer.　　System companies are going back to technical papers published in academia, scrambling to figure out how best to isolate voice. They need to optimize their algorithms to varying settings as they use different microphones and types of speakers.　　Over at Ceva, Wertheizer said, “We had to build an atomic shelter-like studio” to study all the options and develop algorithms for beamforming, far-field and near field, acoustic echo cancelation and ambient noise reductions. System companies need “support, DSP and software” that can navigate a jungle where no standards exist, he said.　　DSP Concepts’ CTO Beckman echoed the sentiment. As much as people love voice as a natural user interface, he said, “Unfortunately, it is one of the most challenging technologies for product designers to effectively implement.” He has already seen too many voice projects go horribly wrong, eventually ending up back on his drawing board.　　Beckman, who cut his teeth as a research engineer at Bose Corp. for nine years, built his business as a consultant in the early 2000s. As he worked with clients on voice projects, he realized they need “a complete software solution” that performs very well, and “underlying technology that will allow them to differentiate.” But most critical was to give them the ability to tune up their systems, he noted.　　As the voice market exploded, so did Beckman’s business. DSP Concepts is no longer a consultancy. The company now offers a complete set of algorithms as software libraries and debugging tools that can help them tweak their individual systems around the edges. “We offer tuning, integration and validation,” said Beckman.　　With the company’s voice UI technology called Audio Weaver, DSP Concepts is the first third-party software company qualified by Amazon for Alexa products. Chin Beckmann, co-founder and CEO of DSP Concepts, told EE Times that an Audio Weaver-enabled voice assistant product has demonstrated — using only two microphones instead of seven used in Amazon’s Echo — that it can “hear” voice much more clearly than either Echo or Google Home.　　Getting pragmatic about AI　　Isolating voice is step number one, Wertheizer said, but other steps follow. A voice assistant must recognize the voice’s location and must be able to track it. Moreover, it needs to detect — and identify — who is speaking in the room.　　Until recently, the cloud was assumed to be where all that processing and learning take place. That assumption will change in 2018.　　Wertheizer explained, “I see people are becoming more pragmatic about AI. They want to do it on the edge” rather than in the cloud, in order to avoid such issues as privacy, latency and cost.　　David Ku, MediaTek’s CFO, agreed. In contrast to Amazon’s push for cloud-to-cloud services in its Echo devices, MediaTek sees possibilities in a hybrid model of “edge and cloud.” He told us at the show that the voice-assistant race already focuses on adding “intelligence” locally, to separate human from non-human voices, cancel music in the background, and recognize vocal patterns.　　Ceva’s CEO said, “Consider a product from Petcube” — a company that designed an interactive Wi-Fi pet camera. It can monitor, talk to, and interact with a dog or cat through two-way audio and a 1080p HD video camera while the owner is not home. “I’m not sure if Petcube realizes that it’s an IoT company,” said Wertheizer. But clearly, in a connected product like this, the voice recognition system must be able to recognize a dog’s barking, and identify if the dog is under stress or in a crisis, he explained. In other words, the system needs smarts to learn.　　Meet Neupro　　While Ceva offers voice algorithms called ClearVox to designers of voice-enabled systems, it also knows this is only half of what system vendors want. System manufacturers want to integrate inside their IoT devices the ability to learn and do inferences, so that their products can continue to get smarter.　　The market craves AI processors. To meet the demand, Ceva launched, at CES, NuePro, “a dedicated low-power AI processor family for deep learning at the edge." NuePro is a self-contained, specialized AI processors that scales in performance for a broad range of markets including IoT, smartphones, surveillance, automotive, robotics, medical and industrial.　　Notably, Ceva is no novice in deep learning. NeuPro reportedly builds on Ceva’s experience in deep neural networks for computer-vision applications.　　Wertheizer said the NeuPro AI processor is the first “non-DSP” technology Ceva has developed from the ground up. In announcing Neupro, “I was a little nervous,” he said. “But you need to understand that AI is not a signal processing problem,.　　The NeuPro processor comes with two pieces of hardware — a NeuPro engine and NeuPro VPU (vector processing unit). While the engine handles well-defined AI algorithms such as CNN, activation and normalization layers, the NeuPro VPU, a programmable vector engine, is an extension that runs proprietary AI algorithms — or algorithms that have not been invented yet — Wertheizer noted. “Rather than using GPU or CPU, we opted for this hardwired implementation, so that we can increase the AI processor’s utilization.”　　Ceva claims that this new family of dedicated AI processors offers “a considerable step-up in performance, ranging from 2 Tera Ops per second (TOPS) for the entry-level processor and 12.5 TOPS for the most advanced configuration.”　　Ceva said NeuPro AI processors will become available for licensing to its lead customers in the second quarter of 2018. The company plans general release in the third quarter.　　Similarly, Taiwan’s MediaTek is getting ready to push AI on the edge with a new AI processor developed by a 2016 Taiwan startup called Intelligo, a MediaTek spinoff.　　Billed as “an intelligent DNN voice processor,” the scope of the AI SoC designed by Intelligo is much more limited. The processor offers “configurable deep neural networks and highly efficient inference engine (1 TOPS per second per watt)," according to the company.　　David Ku, MediaTek’s chief financial officer, said that his company is looking for a modest AI accelerator designed to recognize only 20 to 30 key words. MediaTek is promoting the idea of “decentralized processing” by installing voice and AI not just in a smart speaker like Echo or Google Home, but in a range of small devices — including light switches.

Key word：

CES,AI,Voice

Release time：2018-01-16 00:00 reading：1179 Continue reading>>

Baidu to Release <span style='color:red'>Voice</span> Data for AI

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Baidu to Release Voice Data for AI

　　China Web giant Baidu will make available what it claims are three of the largest data sets related to Chinese voice recognition in an effort to attract developers. Its Project Prometheus also includes $1 million dollar fund to invest in efforts related to voice and machine learning.　　The initiative is part of DuerOS, Baidu’s platform for natural-language services. Earlier this year, the Web giant, known as the Google of China, formally launched DuerOS and a variety of third-party products using it.　　Baidu will gradually open three large datasets, one in far-field wake word detection, one in far-field speech recognition and one in what it calls multi-turn conversations. The data can be used to train new smart voice systems or services.　　The wake-word data consists of about 500,000 voice clips of five to ten popular Chinese wake words. It includes the wake word to activate DuerOS devices, “xiaodu xiaodu.”　　The speech recognition datasets will include thousands of hours of spoken Mandarin. The third data set is made up of thousands of dialogues across ten domains DuerOS currently serves.　　Web giants such as Baidu typically guard the large datasets they accumulate because they are seen as part of their strategic advantage. Baidu’s goal is to enable many small groups to use the data to expand Baidu’s offerings and drive the technology ahead.　　“In the age of AI, data is the new oil,” said Guoguo Chen, Baidu’s principal architect for DuerOS, speaking in a press statement.　　Even giants such as Amazon and Google do not yet support Chinese in their Alexa and Google Assistant products today, in part, due to the complexity of the language.　　Interestingly, Baidu invited Bj?rn Hoffmeister, senior manager of Amazon Machine Learning, to speak about the field at an event in Silicon Valley today where Baidu launched Prometheus. Baidu is taking a page from Facebook which has tried to spawn open source work among partners to gain leverage over larger rivals.　　Under Project Prometheus, Baidu will work with universities and other researchers to conduct joint training, course design and workshops. The effort is geared to attract talent to the field as well as make Baidu a center of technical work in the area.　　Baidu claims more than 100 branded devices from refrigerators and air conditioners to TV set-top boxes and smart speakers currently use its DuerOS.

Key word：

Baidu,AI

Release time：2017-11-10 00:00 reading：1254 Continue reading>>

Synaptics Calls for <span style='color:red'>Voice</span> Standards

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Synaptics Calls for Voice Standards

　　Emerging voice services need standards, said the chief executive of Synaptics as he works to integrate Conexant and a unit of Marvell. Meanwhile, the company expects to be among the first to use a 40nm flash process for its display drivers.　　With the Conexant acquisition, Synaptics will have an instant presence in silicon for voice services from Amazon’s Alexa, Baidu’s DuerOS as well as carrier services in Korea. The company positions the services as a natural extension of its work in touch interface and display chips.　　“Voice will be more important in PCs, printers — in any system that you can think of touch or voice or displays will have a role,” said Rick Bergman, chief executive of Synaptics.　　He called for greater ease of use in the underlying natural-language processing technology in an interview with EE Times.　　“You don’t want 15 flavors of home assistants communicating in different ways. We need standards such as standard commands. You don’t want to learn different digital languages,” Bergman said. “It’s a little early, but maybe the ultimate vision is that AI gets so good it’s smart enough to figure commands out independent of device types,” he added.　　An analyst agreed, noting consumer Internet of Things markets have developed more slowly that predicted, in part due to poor ease-of-use.　　“Voice interfaces help, but natural-language processing is a misnomer. There is nothing natural about talking to today’s devices,” said Mike Demler, a senior analyst with the Linley Group.　　Demler gave an example of a voice device that failed to respond to a simple request. His wife found from research online that it required use of the word “to” before the name of the device.　　“I needed to say, ‘Play jazz to bedroom,’” Demler said. “Right now these devices are teaching us to speak their language rather than the other way around,” he added.　　The good news is the market is moving. Conexant claims it has as many as 60 design wins for its far-field voice chip set. They include an HP PC, Harmon Kardon speakers and an LG refrigerator.　　“There are so many potential applications — car speakers, lighting, thermostats, TVs, set tops…the nice part is we can participate in various ecosystems” such as services from Amazon, Baidu, Samsung and SK Telecom, Bergman said.　　It’s a crowded field with Intel, Mediatek, Nvidia, NXP, Qualcomm, RDA Microelectronics, Realtek and Texas Instruments already engaged.　　“We felt comfortable Conexant’s far-field technology and other audio algorithms were best in class. Its tough stuff to do, and they’ve worked on it for a decade,” Bergman said.

Key word：

Synaptics,Voice Standards

Release time：2017-08-01 00:00 reading：1140 Continue reading>>

Baidu's <span style='color:red'>Voice</span> Exec Speaks Out

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Baidu's Voice Exec Speaks Out

　　Kun Jing wants to enable any embedded system in China to listen to and speak Mandarin. He aims to make Baidu’s DuerOS a kind of Android for natural-language cloud services.　　“Our goal is to have every chip maker pre-install our software,” said Jing, general manager of Baidu’s DuerOS group, in an interview with EE Times. “We want every device to have voice capability,” he said, noting the free DuerOS code can add value to an otherwise commodity Wi-Fi chip.　　So far ARM, Conexant, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Realtek, RDA Microelectronics and one undisclosed chip vendor plan to support DuerOS. They are among about 100 partners that include systems, software and content companies.　　Realtek, RDA and the unnamed chip partner will offer so-called lightweight chip sets. So far, the RDA 5981, a 40nm Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip with an ARM Cortex M4 processor, is the only chip shipping with the DuerOS SDK pre-installed.　　Smartphones such as an HTC handset shipping now will run DuerOS on versions of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. Intel is working with Lenovo on a smart speaker that will ship later this summer.　　As many as 30 DuerOS products are in the works, including smartphones, TVs, refrigerators, air conditioners and speakers from OEMs such as Haier, HTC, Vivo, and Harman. A TV with voice search capabilities shipped in March, and a smart speaker shipped in May.　　“Right now it’s all premium partners we work with closely to port and optimize our software for their chip sets,” said Jing.　　Baidu officially launched DuerOS at a Bejing event July 4 with about 100 different capabilities. It claims its natural language recognition has a 97 percent accuracy rate.　　Despite its name, DuerOS, “is not a traditional operating system, but a cloud service client that supports a wide range of OSes such as FreeRTOS, ARM Mbed, Linux and iOS,” said Jing. (Amazon takes a similar approach with its Alexa voice service.)

Key word：

Baidu's Voice

Release time：2017-07-17 00:00 reading：1107 Continue reading>>

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