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Speech is a much more natural way of interacting with the devices than poking at the screens and buttons, and its popularity has exploded in the recent years, with the voice-enabled digital assistants now integrated into the virtually every household device imaginable.
That growth has been made possible by the works of the companies like the XMOS. The name might not be immediately familiar, but if you have ever used an Amazon Echo than you have benefited from its latest technology.
XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company which is as of now specializing in the voice processing. Its algorithms are capable of detecting the softly spoken voice commands across a room even in the challenging conditions like the room with a lot of hard and tough surfaces.
“I think it makes life easier,” says Alex Craciun, algorithm engineer at XMOS. “You don’t have so many cables and complicated instructions that you have to take care of. You can just give commands and the device tunes itself, or tells you something that you want it to. That’s a lot easier.”
“I play IT support to my parents, and we think voice is going to end that, because your technology will tell you how it works,” adds director of corporate marketing Esther Connock. “It won’t need to come with a remote; it won’t need to come with an instruction booklet – you just talk to it in a very natural, conversational way, and that for us democratizes technology because you don’t need to learn how to use it. You don’t need to come at it with knowledge.
“So if you think about people with low literacy or low levels of education, suddenly it’s a much more open playing field. Vulnerable sectors of society can use technology and become less isolated. So for us, voice is the most natural thing in the world.”