Turning intentions into action: Entering a new era of embedded voice control

【Lansheng Technology News】NXPreleases a speech recognition engine for a new generation of smart speech technology portfolio. In this blog post, we’ll explore the challenges developers face in designing embedded voice controls, our new Speech to Intent engine, and how you can use it in your apps.

To address the speech engine challenges in embedded design, NXP has launched the VIT Speech to Intent engine, the latest product of its Intelligent Voice Technology (VIT) product portfolio. The S2I engine is the high-end product of VIT's product portfolio, which also includes the free wake word engine (WWE) and voice command engine (VCE).

Unlike systems that rely on remote cloud services, VIT S2I is able to determine natural language intent locally. This capability is thanks to NXP’s latest developments in neural network algorithms and machine learning models designed for embedded systems. Therefore, the purpose of "turning on the lights" can be expressed in many different ways, such as "turn on the lights", "it's too dark" and "can you make the light brighter", etc.

This Speech to Intent capability enables users to interact with embedded systems more naturally while reducing system latency and power consumption of cloud-connected systems. Additionally, eliminating cloud services also helps improve security and privacy because all voice is processed locally on the device. In addition, if paired with the NXP wake word engine, ultra-low power consumption designs can be developed. Only after hearing a specific wake word, the VIT S2I engine will be started to process voice commands.

NXPdevices supporting VIT S2I include: Arm® Cortex®-M:i.MX RT crossover MCUs and RW61x MCUs, as well as Cortex A i.MX 8M Mini, i.MX 8MPlus and i.MX 9x application processors. VIT S2I currently supports English, Mandarin and Korean and will be launched by the end of 2023. Online development tools for creating custom commands and training models are planned for release in 2024.