Voice assistant for smart appliances assures user privacy
The new voice assistant is a specialized model of the company’s large vocabulary speech recognition and natural language understanding platform, TrulyNatural, that has been designed for home appliances. This technology, says the company, will help appliance manufacturers create a new wave of smart kitchen appliances that don’t relay voice requests to the cloud, addressing consumer privacy concerns about voice-enabled products.
“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,” says 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.”
The company’s TrulyNatural platform provides a flexible voice UI that can be integrated into a variety of devices, including home/kitchen appliances, vehicle infotainment systems, set-top boxes, home automation, industrial and enterprise applications, mobile apps, and more. Designed to run completely on an application processor, all TrulyNatural speech processing is done natively (at the edge), not in the cloud.
As a result, says the company, it enables a safe, secure, consistent, reliable and easy to implement experience for the end-user, free of requiring any extra apps or Wi-Fi to be set up or operational. It can also be paired with the company’s TrulyHandsfree wake word technology, giving device makers the ability to use their own desired wake words instead of having to use another company’s or potential competitor’s branded wake word. Sensory’s TrulySecure technology can also be integrated to provide biometric-based security and user control features.
The first customer to adopt the smart appliance-specific technology into their products is Midea MCA, a global leader in home microwave appliances.
Dr. Scott Sun, Deputy Director of Midea MCA says, “When it comes to scientific and technological innovation in the home appliances industry Midea is committed to play a leadership role. 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.”
Both companies will be showcasing a new microwave oven capable of understanding naturally spoken requests, without sending any data over the internet, at CES in January.
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