Ultra-Low-Power Development Kit Boosts Far-Field Speech Accuracy for Amazon Alexa Voice Service

DSP Group, Inc., a provider of wireless chipset solutions for converged communications, announced the availability of its HDClear 3-Mic Development Kit for Amazon Alexa Voice Service (AVS). Featuring DBMD5, DSP Group’s advanced audio/voice processor, and its best-in-class HDClear voice enhancement processing technology, the new DSP Group Development Kit is a low-power solution for developers who want to quickly and easily build a range of high-accuracy Alexa-enabled devices — including smart speakers, wearable computing devices, smart home devices, and remote controls — without draining the battery.

With voice assistant devices in the US predicted to grow from 450 million units in 2017 to 870 million devices in 2022, according to Juniper Research, demand for voice user interfaces (VUIs) is strong among users. Developers, in turn, want platforms that enable voice activation while maintaining extremely low power consumption and high performance. The HDClear 3-Mic Development Kit for Amazon AVS satisfies this demand. It includes three main components: a printed circuit board (PCB) with the DBMD5 audio processor, Raspberry Pi and a 3-microphone array — as well as pre-process noise-reduction, beam-forming and Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC) algorithms for enhanced voice accuracy. Operation is as simple as connecting it to a speaker and plugging it into power, reducing time to market and speeding development efforts.