Sensory extends Apple wake words to third-party smart home devices, different languages

Siri is getting global wake words from Sensory, with the company’s edge-based wake word and phrase recognition engine launching support for different platform and languages to enable speech recognition to reach more smart homes.

The TrulyHandsFree SDK can now be used by developers to integrate Hey Siri models into prototypes and finished voice-activated products, according to the company announcement. User speech recognition data and voice biometrics remain on the device to protect user privacy.

Sensory’s Hey Siri Wake Word has already been deployed to products approved for the MFi (Made for iPhone/iPad) ecosystem. The international versions have now been released just as Apple introduces Hey Siri to third-party devices through its smart home platform HomeKit and communications standard Matter.

The company claims de facto leadership in custom wake words, having opened its VoiceHub online portal to developers earlier this year.

With the release of its Hey Siri model, Sensory says it now supports all the most popular virtual assistants, in addition to leading international wake word models.

“Every conversation with a virtual assistant, starts with a wake word, so accurate wake word performance across the world is mandatory for a positive user experience,” said Todd Mozer, Sensory CEO. “Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree wake word engine has shipped in billions of products, including mobile phones, smart speakers, wearables, smart appliances, and automobiles. All of that real-world experience provides a competitive advantage for Sensory models. Our wake words provide unparalleled accuracy with the acoustic challenges of background noise, accented speech, and far-field conditions.”

Sensory says its preset library of popular tuned wake word models, support for two dozen languages and dialects, and the ability to create custom branded wake words with VoiceHub give developers the greatest possible flexibility for virtual assistant wake words. The company provides the wake word engine for Knowles’ recently-released voice interface SDK.

Article Topics

AI  |  Apple  |  biometrics  |  biometrics at the edge  |  SDK  |  Sensory  |  smart homes  |  speech recognition