In a move that could hurt Google’s voice ambitions, Intel has released a speech enabling developers kit that delivers a complete Amazon Alexa voice capability.
Their aim is to get to more third-party smart home devices running via an Intel board or processor.
The chip giant said the Speech Enabling Developer Kit provides which is both hardware and software a complete audio front-end solution for far-field voice control.
The SDK includes Intel’s dual digital signal processor with an interference engine and an eight-mic circular array. The system also utilizes algorithms for acoustic echo cancellation, noise reduction, beamforming and custom wake word engine tuned to “Alexa.”
“There’s a lot of engineering involved in getting speech recognition at high degrees of speed and accuracy to deliver the best customer experiences,” Miles Kingston, general manager of Intel’s smart home group, said in a statement: “The Intel Speech Enabling Developer Kit is based on a new architecture that delivers high-quality far-field voice even in the most acoustically challenging environments.”
For Intel, the new hardware is part of the company’s ongoing focus on the smart home market, as well as its continuing partnership with Amazon. The two tech giants teamed up a year ago on a reference design for Alexa-based products. At the time, Intel said it was on a mission to to help deliver highly-responsive, near-autonomous conversational AI within the home.
