- Todd hoffman using voice changing software android#
- Todd hoffman using voice changing software Bluetooth#
We thought one of the primary uses would be music. Why did you choose Alexa over the other options?
We’ve chosen Alexa for the direct cloud access. We can access any application on the device including the embedded voice assistant. We aren’t doing Siri wake-up but have a VoiceGenie command to access Siri on Apple or Google for Android. We can also call up the voice assistant application on the phone. Mozer: We can do wake-up words for any engine we like, but we have decided to do it for Alexa first. That same article seems to indicate you can facilitate multi-voice AI interaction for Cortana, Siri, Alexa and Google. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get that Amazon Echo experience where you just talk and it responds without having to touch anything, even when music plays. We are actually putting intelligence on that device.
Todd hoffman using voice changing software Bluetooth#
It is the integration with the Bluetooth device that makes it magical. I assume that the other apps run on the phone and write into an Alexa API, but that is a small part of what we’re doing. For example, on a Qualcomm CSR chip we run a recognizer and music decoder together because it is a tiny little system so you need to intertwine the voice recognition with the music player to use both at the same time. My guess is that the other apps haven’t done a recognizer that works on Bluetooth chipsets. Mozer: VoiceGenie is done through a Bluetooth headset and is completely hands free. How will that be different that something like Swift or Lexi?
Todd hoffman using voice changing software android#
I saw in a CNET article that you are building iOS and Android apps to enable cloud access to Alexa on the go. Without that app you can still control the headset and handset with VoiceGenie, you just wouldn’t have Alexa on the go. Mozer: We have a little voice genie app and the user just needs to login to their Amazon account. I now have access to any of those approaches. I can access things with VoiceGenie that assistants can’t do, like control the volume on my headset or access features on the phone through Bluetooth. You can go out on a run and never have to pull your phone out. We call it, “Alexa on the go” because it doesn’t require a WiFi connection. If you say, “Alexa” you can get access to the ten thousand skills on Alexa. If you say “VoiceGenie,” you can control the headset or the mobile device handset. Why are you using Alexa when you have your own speech engine? VoiceGenie feels a lot like having an Amazon Echo in your ear so you can just speak to do what you need to do without ever taking the phone out. The buttons are small and you typically use them without looking at them. The user experience is kind of tough on small headset devices. What I found is that when I am running, I am always pulling out my phone to do things, even answer the phone or change a song. It is much more capable to be used when music is playing. VoiceGenie is a follow-up to a solution we had previously called BlueGenie. Mozer: We have been in the Bluetooth area for about 10 years. How is that different from products you have produced previously? I saw the VoiceGenie announcement from CES. TrulyHandsfree and TrulyNatural are embedded deep learning neural net speech recognition for devices. We have the least battery intensive uses of speech recognition in our TrulyHandsfree line, where we can run on about 1 mA. It has lower MIPS and is less resource intensive. Mozer: We can run it in the cloud, but our unique advantages are on the device. Does this mean you can put your speech engine only on a device or do you have a more compute intensive option that is cloud based? The TrulyNatural solution is a neural net speech engine that claims to have embedded architectures with scalable sizing.
However, we are putting a sizable investment into vision as well as into services to enable more convenient authentication and other capabilities.
Mozer: About 95% of our revenue is dedicated to voice. How much of your business is dedicated to voice? At the time that wasn’t very popular and now pretty much everyone is taking that approach. What is interesting is that we started out doing neural network speech recognition. Our biggest change is we now are using other people’s hardware. We did start with our own chips doing speech recognition. Todd Mozer: We started Sensory with the vision of doing embedded AI, with voice recognition as the initial focus and haven’t done any pivoting except to add vision, biometrics and more natural language. How have things changed for you? Did you start out in voice and voice recognition? Sensory has been around for over 20 years. Todd Mozer is Chairman and CEO of Sensory Inc.