Sensory Launches Smart Wakewords

Sensory, a provider of embedded voice and vision artificial intelligence, has launched Sensory Smart Wakewords, enabling consumer electronics to listen, understand, and act. Now, interacting with devices will feel less like giving commands and more like having a natural conversation.

Sensory Smart Wakewords creates a fluid, intelligent, and personalized interface. Sensory allows devices to be always listening at low power and capture a few seconds of audio in a temporary buffer. When it hears the wakeword, it can process the entire utterance either before or afterwards, understanding the user's intent without forcing an unnatural speaking order.

"We've been trapped in a command-and-control paradigm with voice AI for far too long," said Todd Mozer, CEO of Sensory, in a statement. "The new generation of voice LLMs need a low-power method to call them up, and Smart Wakewords creates the enabling technology that finally shifts the industry toward a natural dialogue paradigm. It's about making the technology adapt to humans, not the other way around. This is the key to unlocking the true potential of voice interaction in consumer electronics for everything from wearables and vehicles to the next generation of robots and voice agents."

Sensory Smart Wakewords operate primarily on-device. This edge intelligence allows for a deeply contextual and adaptive experience that includes the following:

• Contextual Understanding: An integrated Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine determines if a phrase is an intended command or simply background conversation between people,. It can even use simple queries like "How," "Why," or "Tell me"; as a trigger, passing the phrase to a language model to determine if a response is appropriate.
• Adaptive Thresholds: The system intelligently and automatically adjusts its sensitivity. By assessing the signal-to-noise ratio, background noise levels, and even detecting user accents, it can fine-tune its models to minimize false accepts and false rejects in any environment.
• Conversational Flow: Users can engage in frictionless follow-up conversations. After an initial interaction, the system can enter a temporary mode where no wakeword is needed, allowing for a natural back-and-forth dialogue within a user-defined time window.
• Biometric Security The wakeword itself can become a user key. With Sensory's voice biometrics, the technology can be trained to respond only to a specific user's voice.

Sensory Smart Wakewords technology is designed for a vast array of electronics, including wearables, hearables, smartphones, medical devices, automotive systems, and PCs. With the ability to listen for multiple wakewords in parallel, a single device can seamlessly serve multiple functions or users.