Sensory platform for smart kitchen appliances brings voice assistant AI to the edge

Sensory is showcasing at CES 2020 its domain specific assistant for smart appliances based on its vocabulary speech recognition and natural language understanding platform TrulyNatural, the company announced.

Following a partnership with Midea Microwave and Cleaner Appliances (MCA) business unit, a preview of how the system works with a microwave will be available at the Las Vegas event in January.

Although equipped with voice control, Sensory assures users that the kitchen appliances will not risk user privacy and that voice requests will not leave the device. These will not be transmitted to the cloud or stored in it to ensure privacy. Speech processing is performed at the edge and not in the cloud.

“There are certain products where having a cloud-connected voice assistant capable of playing music, checking the weather and telling you a joke makes sense, but there are countless products where it would be unnecessary,” said Todd Mozer, CEO at Sensory. “TrulyNatural is the perfect solution for device makers that want to create powerful products capable of understanding and responding to spoken commands, but don’t need the added complexity, component costs and potential privacy risks associated with leveraging a cloud-based voice services platform.”

Thanks to a flexible voice UI, TrulyNatural runs on an application processor and can be integrated in any device regardless of shape and size including home/kitchen appliances, vehicle infotainment systems, set-top boxes, home automation, industrial and enterprise applications and mobile apps. The technology also works with Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree wake word technology and TrulySecure for biometric-based security and user control features with voice control.

TrulyNatural supports US English, with UK English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish planned for release in 2020. SDKs are available for a number of platforms including Android, iOS, Windows and Linux.

“When it comes to scientific and technological innovation in the home appliances industry Midea is committed to play a leadership role,” said Dr. Scott Sun, Deputy Director of Midea MCA. “We firmly believe in ‘consumer-first technology’ and strive to maintain a technological advantage through teamwork and innovation. By teaming up with Sensory we are able to not only modernize the consumer experience offered by our products but do so in a way that addresses the increasingly alarming privacy issue that concerns many consumers worldwide.”

A demo of the prototype can be viewed on YouTube.

Article Topics

artificial intelligence  |  biometrics  |  biometrics at the edge  |  data protection  |  Sensory  |  speech recognition  |  voice biometrics