Amazon recently announced their new Amazon Alexa Premium Far-Field Voice Development Kit. This dev kit uses “far-field-in-a-chip” architecture which combines Amazon’s audio front end technology on a single processor chip for efficient and simplified integration into commercial products.
This updated architecture provides a nearly drop-in solution that includes the complex audio processing functions on a dedicated processor that reduces product development time and risk and affords the developer superior flexibility in the system architecture of the product. As with the previous generation of Amazon’s Far-Field dev kit, the 7 Mic Far Field solution, NXP is collaborating with Amazon to provide the Pico i.MX7Dual processing board running the Alexa SDK.
The Amazon Alexa Premium Far-Field Voice Development Kit is built with the newest and highest performance generation of Amazon’s far field audio processing technology—with the same voice recognition performance found in the latest Echo devices and using the same microphone array as the Echo and Echo Show. Additionally, this is the first instance of the Amazon Wake Word Engine running on a DSP, this combined with the Pico i.MX7Dual allows device manufacturers to quickly integrate Alexa voice capabilities into their products.
As with the 7 Mic Far Field dev kit, the Amazon Alexa Premium Far-Field Voice Development Kit is aimed at OEMs and ODMs for evaluating and prototyping a wide range of products including connected speakers, media and entertainment devices, home appliances, communication devices, and other smart home products. Availability will be through Amazon on the Alexa Voice Services website.
Robert Thompson is Global Director i.MX Ecosystem. He focuses on developing the ecosystem to enable customers to get to market as fast and competitively as possible. Robert is an industry expert in consumer electronics with over 20 years of experience in diverse regions, including Europe, Brazil and the US.
