Qualcomm Introduces Smart Audio Chipset as Voice Interface 'Here to Stay'
Qualcomm is eyeing a smart speaker market pegged at 220 million devices globally by 2020, Rob Saunders, director-product marketing, told us before Tuesday's announcement of a next-generation “smart audio” chipset. The company, he said, is pushing a “clear and obvious…
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interest in voice UI,” or user interface. Interest extends to speakers with displays, cameras and audio products. Voice interface “is here to stay and across a variety of devices,” Saunders said. Music playback is the most requested smart speaker use, in some surveys as much as 70 percent. Immersive audio technology -- Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and Sony’s 360 Reality Audio, based on MPEG-H 3D Audio, launched at CES -- could drive a new wave of audio, said Saunders. The chipsets have Wi-Fi 802.11ax and Bluetooth radios and can support Zigbee devices. Having compute power on the chip lets engineers move some voice and speech recognition and natural language processing from the cloud to the local device for simple commands, said Saunders. That's useful in geographies with poor internet reliability, he said, for backup local control of devices without connectivity.