Amazon Echo & how it resonates

PARIS — Whatever you call them — smart microphones, virtual digital assistant, personal home robots, The Control Voice or R2D2 — Amazon Echo-like products are on the rise.

The second generation Echo Dot, whose price has been just dropped from $89.99 to $49.99 compared with its first-generation version, will be on sale in the US market next month.

Amazon’s Echo (and subsequent Dot) has opened a new market enabling device vendors to compete on better audio quality in voice capture, higher mic audio resolution, more sophisticated background noise filtering, better far field detection, and unflappable connectivity.

Companies like XMOS, although whose chips not designed in Echo, say they are geared up for the new voice interface market. Paul Neil, vice president and business development at XMOS, told EE Times last week, “[The] Internet of things are a bit of a movable feast right now. But to control these [IoT] devices, voice is the most natural user interface.”

With “a unique combination of conventional microcontroller performance, embedded DSP and flexible I/O,” Neil said, “We have the technology that’s an ideal match for voice interfaces.”

The battle among hardware devices, however, is only half the story that makes up the smart microphone/speaker market. “The real competitive variables come from the cloud side of the equation,” Paul Erickson, senior analyst of connected home at IHS Markit, told EE Times.

This article was originally published on EE Times. To read the rest of the article, please click here.